Fire vs. Steel - the facts

"Prior to 9/11, no steel-framed buildings had ever collapsed due to fire. On 9/11, three steel-framed buildings collapsed, supposedly due to fire." - you've probably heard something along those lines in the past 5 years.

And you've probably also heard the rebuttal, "The planes hit the buildings, the buildings caught on fire, the buildings collapsed - simple as that."

In fact, some lucky viewers were fed the ‘fire caused the collapse’ line almost immediately after the towers fell...

More recently, the folks at Protec Documentation Services (and/or Implosionworld.com) released a paper late last year, designed to rebut various claims regarding the collapses of the buildings at the WTC complex. And they must be doing something right, because even the US State Department refers skeptical visitors to the ImplosionWorld website...

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This post focuses on one single aspect of the Protec/IW paper, specifically Protec's comment in response to Assertion #8 (A steel-framed building has never collapsed due to fire...)

Protec's answer? "The fact is, many steel structures have collapsed due to fire..."

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That answer (and the sentences surrounding it) seemed like a weak and/or disingenuous response. The assertion was about 'steel-framed buildings', the rebuttal was regarding 'steel structures', and the author makes no mention of the number or severity of these other fire-caused collapses. So i did some digging, in an effort to discover what these 'many steel structures' might be.

First stop, Fire Protection Engineering's online archive, which has their Historical Survey of Multistory Building Collapses Due to Fire. More of an 'overview' document, really.

And that led me to NIST GCR 02-843.

This report was prepared by Hughes Associates, Inc. under Contract Number NA1341-02-W-0686.

Their data (not included in the fpe article) shows the other two steel structures which, in addition to WTC 1, 2, 5, and 7, make up the total of SIX steel buildings (in all of modern recorded history) which have collapsed due to fire.

1. One New York Plaza (NY, NY, 08/05/70) - partial collapse
50-story office building. Fire caused several steel filler beams on the 33-34th floors to fall and rest on the bottom flanges of their supporting girders.

2. Alexis Nihon Plaza (Montreal, Canada, 10/26/96) - partial collapse
15-story steel-framed office building. Approximately five hours after the fire started, a section of the 11th floor collapsed onto the 10th floor.

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The NIST report also goes on to list the many steel-framed buildings that have suffered extensive fire damage and NOT collapsed:

• One Meridian Plaza -
  38 floors, no sprinklers, 18-hour fire, no collapse.



• Mercantile Credit Insurance Building -
  12 floors, no sprinklers, fire burnout of floors 8-10, no collapse.



• Broadgate Phase 8 -
  14 floors, mostly not fire protected, no sprinklers, 4.5-hour fire, temperatures up to 1000C, no collapse.



• First Interstate Bank -
  62 floors, no sprinklers, 3.5-hour fire, no collapse.

When Brent Blanchard, the author of the Protec/IW paper, wrote that "the fact is, many steel structures have collapsed due to fire", he must've realized that 2/3 of the 'many' structures he was referring to were in fact the WTC buildings themselves.

And he also didn't differentiate between the FULL collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7 and the PARTIAL collapses of WTC5 and the two examples above.

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So again, just to re-state the undebunkable truth, prior to 9/11, no steel-framed building had ever fully collapsed due to fire.

Hope that's clear enough for everyone.