December 8, 2010
By Craig McKee
It’s one of the most inconvenient truths of 9/11: molten metal.
Those who support the official government conspiracy theory brush off the question of why there were large pools of molten metal under the World Trade Center for months after the attacks. They won’t give you an answer because there isn’t an answer that fits with their “official story.”
Not one explanation that makes any sense has been given to explain what many eyewitnesses reported.
In the comment streams of this blog and others I’ve seen, doubt has been raised about whether we really know that this molten metal was even there. One person in particular has thrown around ideas like the pools being made up of molten aluminum from the planes. If someone thinks that hypothesis is worth their time to analyze, be my guest. I don’t. On top of not being supported by any evidence at all, it doesn’t work because Building 7, which collapsed even though it wasn’t hit by a plane, also had molten metal pools under it. The source for this is NASA thermal imaging done a couple of weeks after 9/11.
The idea that it was burning jet fuel is equally unbelievable. If someone can make a case for how jet fuel could burn that hot and that long (three months, according to the New York City fire marshal, who pronounced the fires extinguished on Dec. 19, 2001), by all means they’re welcome.
I wrote a post on Oct. 24 about the subject, making the case that planes and collapse simply can’t provide an explanation. I return to the subject because I’d like to reinforce the idea that the pools of molten metal were seen by many people, including then Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani can’t explain them, but he knows they were there.
So, for the record, here are some of the people who say they saw the molten pools. I have not footnoted every quote, but I have cited the book, film, or web site where the quotes can be found. Two of the books were written by David Ray Griffin, so some quotes appear in more than one book. I didn’t refer to the people quoted in Griffin’s Debunking 9/11 Debunking because those witnesses are quoted elsewhere.
The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, by David Ray Griffin:
FDNY Captain Philip Ruvolo said, “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel, molten steel running down the channel rails, like you’re in a foundry, like lava.”
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, professor of civil engineering at University of California at Berkeley, received a National Science Foundation grant to spend two weeks at Ground Zero studying steel from the buildings. He said he “saw the melting of girders in the World Trade Center.” He described steel flanges that “had been reduced from an inch thick to paper thin.” He said he saw 10-ton steel beams that “looked like giant sticks of twisted licorice.” He said he saw steel that had become smoothly warped at points where beams connected. This he said could only have happened had become yellow or white hot, indicating temperatures “perhaps around 2,000F.”
Professor Alison Geyh of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health led a scientific team that went to the site shortly after 9/11 on behalf of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences: “In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten steel.”
Joe O’Toole, a Bronx firefighter who worked for months on the rescue and clean-up efforts, was quoted by Knight Ridder journalist Jennifer Lin. She wrote: “Fires raged underground for months. O’Toole remembers in February seeing a crane lift a steel beam vertically from deep within the catacombs of Ground Zero. “It was dripping from the molten steel.”
Dr. Keith Eaton, chief executive of the London-based Institution of Structural Engineers, said that after a tour of the site he was shown slides of “molten metal that was still red hot weeks after the event.”
9/11 Contradictions by David Ray Griffin
Leslie Robertson, who was a member of the engineering firm that designed the twin towers, was quoted by James Williams, the president of the Structural Engineers Association of Utah, as saying in a speech: “As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten metal was still running.” Robertson retreated from this later in an interview that was part of a live debate with physicist Steven Jones in 2006. As you’ll see below, one of Robertson’s own colleagues, Richard Garlock, confirms the existence of the molten metal.
Herb Trimpe, an Episcopalian deacon who was a chaplain at Ground Zero, said: “It was actually warmer on site. The fires burned up to 2,000 degrees for quite a while. I talked to many contractors, and they said… beams had just totally been melted because of the heat.”
Guy Lounsbury of the New York Air National Guard spent several weeks at Ground Zero. He wrote in his journal: “Mountains of rubble five or six storeys high are all that remain of the towers…Smoke constantly poured from the peaks. One fireman told us that there was still molten steel at the heart of the towers’ remains.”
The Hidden History of 9-11, edited by Paul Zarembka
Peter Tully of Tully Construction: saw pools of “literally molten steel.”
Mark Loizeaux of Controlled Demolition Inc.: “hot spots of molten steel” found at the bottom of elevator shafts seven basement storeys down.
Greg Fuchek, vice-president of sales for LinksPoint Inc., which supplied some of the computer equipment used to identify human remains at Ground Zero, said the working conditions were “hellish” partly because for six months the ground temperature ranged from 600F to 1,500F.
The 9/11 Mystery Plane and the Vanishing of America by Mark H. Gaffney
Journalist William Langewiesche wrote in American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center about “streams of molten metal that streamed from the hot cores and flowed down broken walls inside the foundation hole.”
Joel Meyerowitz, photographer, took many pictures around GZ and said rubble was so hot it melted workmen’s boots.
Testimony before 9/11 Commission (historycommons.org)
Ken Holden, who is involved with the organizing of demolition, excavation and debris removal operations at Ground Zero, later will tell the 9/11 Commission, “Underground, it was still so hot that molten metal dripped down the sides of the wall from [WTC] Building 6.” (http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=leslie_robertson)
And if you’re still not convinced, in the film Improbable Collapse, we get the testimony of Rudy Giuliani, then mayor New York City. Giuliani hasn’t said he saw the molten metal, but in the film (I believe he is testifying before the 9/11 Commission), he did say, “There were fires of 2,000F below the ground,” adding that fires would sometimes burst through and threaten those on the surface, including himself. “It was just by luck or the design of God that we weren’t killed.”
So, official story believers, where did it come from? This article does seek to prove any scientific analysis, it just seeks only to show that many credible people reported the same thing. The ONLY thing that makes any sense to me, and to the rest of the 9/11 Truth movement, is that this unexplained molten metal was a by-product of some kind of a controlled demolition. If there’s a more credible explanation, I haven’t heard it.
The USGS thermal imaging detected temperatures up to ~1400F:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/ofr-01-0429/thermal.r09.html
easily explained by the long-lasting debris fires, and hot enough to melt lead from UPS systems, or to keep fuselage and building aluminum molten. Simply put, nanothermite and other explosives wouldn’t produce pools of molten metal, and no incendiary known to mankind stays hot for more than a few minutes.
Dear Albury,
Thanks for the comment. I learn as much from people who are convinced they must ‘debunk’ various arguments as I have reading those arguments themselves. In 5 1/2 years that I have spent off and on, reading arguments on both sides, I have never read a ‘debunking’ argument that stuck. I don’t want these arguments to go one way or another, its just the way this episode has presented itself so far.
Suppose that office fires burned at some high temperature, your claim of 1400 degrees is as good as any. We must look at *where* those fires occurred. In the twin towers, the planes struck the buildings about 1000 feet in the air, around the 90th floor (plus or minus). That’s not 90 floors of dead air space, its 90 steel floor pans with 4″ or 6″ of concrete. Its 90 floors of carpeting, duct work, ceiling tiles, office furniture etc. So, when the collapses occurred, we’d expect the burning material to be 90% of the way up the debris pile towards the top (at least for the twin towers). You would have to ask yourself how the burning office material from around the 90’th floor, made its way around the bottom 90 floors worth of mass and ended up in the sub basements of the WTC.
Next, if we download the videos of the twin towers just as collapse occurred, we see that the impact area floors compressed first. This means that a ten story building (the top 10 or so floors MOSTLY UNDAMAGED), moved downward rapidly, compressing the floors immediately below it. That represents roughly a one acre square box, the bottom of which is a steel pan covered with concrete.
I don’t know about you, but I can not think of anything that would be better suited to extinguish office fires on floors 88 through 90 but a ten story box of concrete and steel compressing it. Then, as the top ten floors disintegrated, those floors were smashing through all of the material below.
Picture this: 3 floors of a building on fire. The building floors are about one acre square. Then, a ten story building above those 3 floors, compressing the 3 floors that were on fire into dust.
If you look carefully at one of the towers collapse (I can never remember which one was the north and south tower), you will see as the top 10 floor piece of the building begins to move, a fireball shoot out of the damage area. That puff of fire was the bottom floor of the top section of the building compressing the floors that were on fire to zero height.
What office fires, I ask you, would remain after a one acre steel pan filled with concrete, and topped with ten more floors with the same, compressed those floors?
Thanks, Mike. That’s a very intelligent take on the fire question. And frankly, it’s one I hadn’t thought much about. I’ve often pointed out the molten metal under the rubble as being impossible within the office fire model, but you’re quite right that the fires would be above most of the rubble.
Dear Mr. Albury writes:
No, it is not so easily explained by long-lasting debris fires, because debris and rubble sat on top of it, smothered it, and made it difficult for air/oxygen to fuel such fires, particularly when the fire department began dumping water on it as well.
Moreover, you should Google what temperatures a debris fire, or an office fire, or even a jet fueled fire can reach, thereby further shooting down your explanation. Mr. Limey can help you on this, because he was recently given a tutorial on this on another of Mr. McKee’s articles.
Your statements about nanothermite and other explosives not producing pools of molten metal are only half true. The half that is false is that those mechanisms could indeed produce pools of molten metal; the half that is true is that those mechanisms could not maintain those pools of molten metal over time.
Señor El Once
This is (probably) true.
Now if you really want an Occam Razor easy explanation for the detected temperatures up to ~1400F, try multiple milli-nukes (as is 1/1000th the nukes you are envisioning). Unspent and fizzling left-over nuclear material from companion fracticided milli-nukes can easily explain the recorded temperatures, their duration, the methods employed in the clean-up, the high security of the area, the suppression of photos & images, the shipping off of materials for recycling, the song-and-dance dog-and-pony show of various alphabet soup govt agencies to control the reports, control the message, control the propaganda…
This possibility must be considered since it seems that no one seems to be able to adequately explain the length of time the metal remained molten.
Craig, agreed, and not only the length of time the metal remained molten, but what exactly caused the metal to become molten in the first place!
Absolutely. That’s the key question. And I’m still waiting for a reasonable explanation from a purveyor of the official story.
I really appreciate you taking this on. There are more questions than answers about what really happened on that fateful day and we deserve to know the truth. Jet fuel does not melt metal, period. I’m leaning toward the mini-nukes postulation as it does cover the gamut of anomalies – the molten metal and fire that burned for three months, the engine blocks and handles from cars up to a mile away disintegrating, and the very curious fires that burned inside of the cars but not the paper blowing around outside…We must pursue this. We are handing this madness to our children, and we can do better than this.
I agree, Sarah, we do deserve to know the truth. And we shouldn’t have to wait decades to get it. The photos of those burned out cars are probably the least known but most shocking elements of the 9/11 story. I appreciate the comment.
This is why CT’s are not taken seriously. “I’m leaning toward the mini-nukes”
People who use terms like “CT’s” should not be taken seriously.
And a strawman
Craig, thanks for the thought provoking post. Its great to see many people posing various arguments about the many hundreds of issues regarding the events on 09/11/2001.
What is most disturbing is the that there is not ONE Congressman or Senator willing to stick their neck out and address these issues. I have written our congressman, John Tierney, many times, about these issues as they have arisen, and I get responses varying from “When and if any new information become available, I will look into it…”, to outright ignoring my requests for a new investigation.
Congress is not dragging their feet, they are putting a concerted effort into suppressing our request for a genuine investigation.
Glad to have you as a reader. Unfortunately, no politician will stick their neck out even a little bit on this. It’ll have to be so compelling that they won’t be going out on a limb. But worse than that, anyone who has made it to congress isn’t likely to want to question the establishment that they are a willing part of.
Craig, If god himself came and told you that Islamic terrorists committed 9/11 you would call him a shill. You do not want the truth. You want you psychological needs of security meet. Even if it means spiting of the grave of the dead.
What a load of crap. I base my views about 9/11 on evidence. “Needs of security”? I don’t even know what that means. As for spitting on graves, that’s the most absurd comment of all. Challenging the official version is disrespectful to the victims? How about settling for a lie? How does than honor them?
Why waste the money? We are 18 trillion in debt.
This is for the gormless shill allblurry
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/05/arguments-regarding-collapse-of-world.html
Dear Mr. Harry,
Thank you so much for the link to Washington’s Blog. Quite an amazing accomplishment. Good work, I say to whomever the author or authors truly are! Not just for the individual posting highlighted, but more importantly for the body of work that Washington’s Blog built up!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ArnYryJqCwU