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Many of the beams were twisted and distorted as though made of rubber or wax. Some beams were over 6 [inches] thick and bent like pretzels. Structural engineers, who are experts in steel structures that have suffered earthquakes and explosions claimed to have seen nothing like this before and could not imagine the kind of pressure and heat required to do this kind of damage.

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I found it hard to believe that it bent because the size of it and how there's no cracks in the iron. It's bent without almost a single crack in it. It takes thousands [?] degrees to bend steel like this.

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Architects and engineers -- people who work with steel -- welders have just never seen the level of destruction and the level of deformation of this material in our lives.

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It was like the surface of another planet. All there was, was powdered debris and metal. It was a - a very strange scene.

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by metamars on Thu Jan 08, 2009 5:21 pm
I went to the NYC Police Museum today to verify that the article and accompanying text were genuine. They are, indeed. Furthermore, there were a few shards of glass, with the following text, which I copied down:
'Glass was a rare find at Ground Zero, where these shards were recovered. The collapse and fires pulverized and melted most of the glass from the Twin Towers 43,600 windows.'

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You have two 110-story office buildings. You don't find a desk. You don't find a chair. You don't find a telephone, a computer. The biggest piece of a telephone I found was half of the keypad, and it was about this big. The building collapsed to dust. How are we supposed to find anybody in this that there's nothing left of the building?"

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[Narrator] Aside from huge pieces of twisted steel from the towers, there was little that was recognizable in the debris. Shrapnel-like fragments. Gray dust. No one had ever seen anything like it, even at the site of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, also destroyed by an act of terrorism.

[O'Dowd] I said, you know, in Oklahoma City, you could see pieces of desks and chairs. There was something that told you that this was an office building. At the World Trade Center site it seems like everything was pulverized.

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Molten steel was encountered primarily during excavation of debris around the South Tower when large hydraulic excavators were digging trenches 2 to 4 meters deep into the compacted/burning debris pile. There are both video tape and still photos of the molten steel being "dipped" out by the buckets of excavators. I'm not sure where you can get a copy.

Sorry I cannot provide personal confirmation.

Regards,

Mark Loizeaux, President
CONTROLLED DEMOLITION, INC.
2737 Merryman's Mill Road
Phoenix, Maryland USA 21131
Tel: 1-410-667-XXXX
Fax: 1-410-667-XXXX
www.controlled-demolition.com

honway posted on 2003-12-13

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The fires got very intense down there and actually melted beams where it was molten steel that was being dug up.

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September 16--Thermal imagery measures the progression of underground heat on about a weekly basis. These images are produced in 8-bit grayscale, with brightness levels of 0-255, 0 being the hottest and expressed as pure white. This is known as emissive data, or heat being given off from the structure from underlying hot debris or molten steel. Smoldering is yet undetectable, because potential fires appear cold until they are exposed to air. The first thermal images produced began on September 16, and are repeated on two day intervals. I would like to thank Jeff Bliss for the wonderful information and imagery he provided for this story, and acknowledge the 16-20 hours days CARSI Lab director Dr. Sean Ahearn has been putting in at the OEM. I would also like to credit Jeff Bliss, Constandinos Theophilides, and Bob Sklar for their tireless analysis. For a more in-depth look on CARSI, see the upcoming January special issue.

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'Think of the thousands of file cabinets, computers, and telephones in those towers - I never saw one - everything was pulverized,' he said. 'Everything that was above grade - above the 6th and 7th floor - disintegrated...it was like an explosion.' Tully Construction specializes in concrete. I asked Mr. Tully if he had ever seen concrete pulverized as it was at the WTC.

'No - never,' he said.

Tully said that there were hot spots where he observed 'literally molten steel.' Asked about what could have caused such intense heat, Tully said, 'Think about the jet fuel.'

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'It's still cooking,' said Thomas O'Connor, who manages the construction and engineering work at the site for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the buildings and arranged for the tour through the basement.

In the days after the collapse of the towers two months ago, the tangled steel was still so hot that it glowed like charcoal briquets in the unlighted basement, Mr. O'Connor said, adding, 'For seven weeks it was surreal down here.'

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It took me a long time to realize it and I found myself actually one day wanting to get back. Why? Because I felt more comfortable. I realized it was actually warmer on site. The fires burned, up to 2,000 degrees, underground for quite a while before they actually got down to those areas and they cooled off.

I talked to many contractors and they said they actually saw molten metal trapped, beams had just totally had been melted because of the heat. So this was the kind of heat that was going on when those airplanes hit the upper floors. It was just demolishing heat.

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A veteran of disasters from the Mississippi floods [to] Mt. St. Helens, Burger said it reminded him most of the volcano, if he forgot he was in downtown Manhattan. 'Feeling the heat, seeing the molten steel, the layers upon layers of ash, like lava, it reminded me of Mt. St. Helen's [sic] and the thousands who fled that disaster,' he said.

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Fire Department Chief Mike Donoho of Texas Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue described the scope of the destruction, 'Everything had its own look. In the area surrounding what was the two twin towers, there were several buildings still standing that were burned from top to bottom, and some of them were damaged by the collapse. But the two towers -- they were 110-story buildings. And there was nothing that you could put your hands on that resembled anything that would tell you this once was two 110-story office buildings. What you had were large columns of steel that were just stuck into massive amounts of molten steel and other metals, that had just fused together from the heat and bonded together from the strength of the collapse. We dug and we dug and we dug, and we cut and we cut and we cut, and we did not see anything that resembled any type of furniture, any type of personal belongings. We found some pieces of things like a telephone, things like that. I think we found credit cards a few times, and we found a couple of stuffed animals. But you would expect to see, like, a bunch of desks, a bunch of chairs. The only way I can explain it is, if you take a car and put it in one of those machines where they crush it and make it look like a cube, and you can't recognize what it is, that's what the whole area looked like. It looked like a massive, molten mess that had been fused together, like a car that had been cubed and crushed. With all that heavy, heavy stuff, there were wires, rebar, concrete. Most of it was just steel. A lot of what we were walking on was just molten steel.'

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Another danger involved the high temperature of twisted steel pulled from the rubble. Underground fires burned at temperatures up to 2,000 degrees. As the huge cranes pulled steel beams from the pile, safety experts worried about the effects of the extreme heat on the crane rigging and the hazards of contact with the hot steel. And they were concerned that applying water to cool the steel could cause a steam explosion that would propel nearby objects with deadly force. Special expertise was needed. OSHA called in structural engineers from its national office to assess the situation. They recommended a special handling procedure, including the use of specialized rigging and instruments to reduce the hazards.

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The 'hot spots,' where intensely burning debris generated temperatures in excess of 1300 degrees Fahrenheit, posed a significant danger to relief workers. NASA had an instrument that could provide information that would be useful to emergency responders. NASA's Airborne Visible infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) science instrument was capable of providing data that could be used to filter smoke and locate extreme hot spots.

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The dogs were trained to sniff out bodies. They weren't trained to recognize heat. So when they hopped on a smoldering I-beam [some of which were hot enough to melt the firefighters' rubber-soled boots] they'd get hurt. Some of them even ignited," said Bellone, who added that the firefighters were often slowed down because they stopped to care for their four-footed comrades, many of which could not be saved. "We retired a lot of them because of burns or just stress," he said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency team assembled at the site included scores of veterinarians.

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The pile of debris after 30 days of removal operations was still gigantic, over three stories high, with structural steel projecting 7-10 stories into the air. The steam, dust, noise, steel and myriad activities were larger than anything I have ever seen. Temperatures in the pile were over 1,200 °F. Every time an area was opened, fire started in any buried combustible debris. Water trucks and fire engines were used continually. The high temperature debris and water created steam.

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As in a stubborn coal mine fire, the combustion taking place deep below the surface is in many places not a fire at all. Instead, oxygen is charring the surfaces of buried fuels in a slow burn more akin to what is seen in the glowing coals of a raked-over campfire. But the scale of the trade center burning is vast, with thousands of plastic computers, acres of flammable carpet, tons of office furniture and steel and reservoirs of hydraulic oil and other fuels piled upon one another. Steel beams pulled from the debris at times are so hot they are cherry red. Benzene, propylene, styrene and other chemicals generated by the combustion of computers, office products and fuels drift through the air.

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A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures, Dr. Barnett said.

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The severe corrosion and subsequent erosion of Samples 1 and 2 are a very unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified. The rate of corrosion is also unknown. It is possible that this is the result of long-term heating in the ground following the collapse of the buildings. It is also possible that the phenomenon started prior to collapse and accelerated the weakening of the steel structure. A detailed study into the mechanisms of this phenomenon is needed to determine what risk, if any, is presented to existing steel structures exposed to severe and long-burning fires.