Hey Rosie! Google This! Fire DOES Melt Steel

Is Rosie O'Donnell returning any phone calls today? I wondered that after I saw this story today. See Rosie went on a 9/11 Truther rant not too long ago. (Ian @ Hot Air picked it up.) Even the people @ Popular Mechanics had to go back to the debunking side of things in her small minded debate.

Remember, she said in those rants on The View that "for the first time in history, fire melted steel," or something to that effect. That was not true then, and sure as heck was not true yesterday when this accident occurred:

Bay Area residents began potentially their worst commute in almost two decades Monday, a day after one of the region's most traveled sections of freeway melted and collapsed following a fiery crash.

An elevated section of highway that carries motorists from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to a number of freeways was destroyed early Sunday after heat from an overturned gasoline truck caused part of one overpass to crumple onto another. ...

The crash occurred around 3:45 a.m. on the MacArthur Maze, a network of ramps and interchanges at the edge of downtown Oakland and about a half-mile from the Bay Bridge toll plaza. Witnesses reported flames rising up to 200 feet into the air.

Heat exceeded 2,750 degrees and caused the steel beams holding up the interchange above to buckle. Bolts holding the structure together also melted, leading to the collapse, California Department of Transportation director Will Kempton said.

Here, we will let the engineering guys explain it:

Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength--and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."

"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.

"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."

Rosie, meet the truth. And if truth is to be told here, Rosie O'Donnell's a nut who has no clue what she is talking about. To take her word on 9/11 is to take Al Gore's word on global warming. He is not a scientist or a climatologist. She is not an engineer, and the people she cites as "knowing what they are talking about" have been debunked and embarrassed by a host of real engineers that there was no sort of "inside job" for 9/11.

Just remember who these people are accusing. They are accusing the United States federal government of committing one of the worst acts of mass murder in this nation's history. How many times have we said that if you want something done right then do not put the government in charge. They will only screw it up. Besides it boggles the mind as to how much work and time would have gone into preparing both buildings.

Marcie