Wednesday, September 14, 2011

More Mohr

Chris Mohr, whose debate defeat of Richard Gage was so embarrassing that the Architects and Engineers deep-sixed a plan to create a video of the event, is back with an Eskeptic piece.

WHAT ABOUT THE SULFIDIZED STEEL THAT MELTED AND THAT FEMA FOUND BUT WHICH NIST IGNORED IN THEIR REPORT? NIST didn’t ignore it. Jonathan Barnett at FEMA studied two pieces of sulfidized steel, which is not enough to explain the collapse. NIST determined that neither piece came from a supporting column in the collapse zone so it couldn’t have contributed to the collapse.7 Sulfidized steel melts at temperatures 1000° lower than regular steel so it could have “melted” in a regular office fire. And the “intergranular melting” FEMA discovered is not like melting as we know it anyway; it’s more like corrosion on an almost microscopic scale occurring along the boundaries between the crystals or grains of a metal. The technical description for what happened is “intergranular melting, high temperature corrosion via sulphidation, oxidation, and decarburisation leading to a liquid Iron Oxide Suflur mix from grain boundary melting.” And while Jonathan Barnett would like to see more research on this, he does not support the controlled demolition theory.

Terrific article.