ERROR: 'Both Towers' Fires Diminished Before Their Collapses'
The often-repeated assertion that the fires in the Twin Towers
were becoming less severe prior to the collapses is only
partially true:
The evidence shows that the South Tower's fires remained confined
to a limited area and were dwindling before its collapse;
but it shows that the North Tower's fires became more severe
after the collapse of the South Tower.
The fire severity issue is a red herring in any case:
even if the towers had burned like torches,
with white-smoke emitting and blue flames making
their steel superstructures glow red-hot,
that in no way could have led to their exploding
into fine dust and shattered fragments of steel.
Nor could it have explained how the towers
disintegrated from top to bottom at nearly free-fall speed.
The failure to acknowledge the much greater severity of the
North Tower's fires also concedes a point that is persuasive
to many who fail to appreciate the absurdity of the official
story that top-down
progressive collapse
totally destroyed the towers:
the South Tower,
which was struck in an oblique manner and had only small diminishing fires,
stood for only 56 minutes before collapsing
whereas the North Tower,
which was struck head-on and had large growing fires,
stood for 102 minutes before collapsing.
The North Tower's Fires
Even with the many photographs such as are archived in the
9-11 Research
Twin Tower Fires page, it is difficult to construct a very
detailed account of the progression of the fires.
It appears that the smoke from the North Tower was light in the
first few minutes after the crash before the jet fuel had burned off.
It then appears to have become darker, but the color of the smoke
in the various sets of photographs is not easy to compare due
to differences in lighting, film, etc.
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This image is from Chapter 2
of FEMA's WTC Building Performance Study.
It shows a person standing in the North Tower's impact hole
was apparently taken rather early in the interval of time between
jet impact and collapse.
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The North Tower after 9:59 AM
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The North Tower's fires appear to become more extensive after
the collapse of the South Tower.
In the photo to the right, taken after the South Tower's collapse,
the impact hole in which the person was standing is now filled with smoke,
and flames are visible about three stories below.
Also there are flames about ten stories above the impact zone on the
tower's northwest side (right face in the photo).
Photos taken immediately before the South Tower's collapse show no evidence
of flames in this region.
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page last modified: 2006-08-18
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