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2004-04-23 Home Front: WoT

Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef (Part 12, Final)

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Posted by Mike Sylwester 2004-04-23 7:08:26 AM|| || Front Page|| [3 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Another one of my pet peeves. Go back to the pictures of the Saudi building boomed the other day. Vertical supports are buckled and floors are partially collapsed. These were clearly "air coupled" explosive effects. Just because a guy is a licensed civil-structual engineer or has imploded buildings, doesn't make him an expert in the effects of several thousand pounds of HE 20 or 30 feet outside an office building. I would instead look to the after WWII bomb damage surveys for empirical data based on a large number of samples.

Posted by 11A5S 2004-04-23 9:13:37 AM|| 2004-04-23 9:13:37 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 BTW, here are the effects of overpressure waves from explosions:

A 55.2 kPa (8 PSI) overpressure wave is considered to be highly lethal and can collapse building floors. According to paragraph 3 above, the blast wave at OK City was 200 PSI when it intersected the Murrah building facade. This is in fact greater than the overpressure needed to topple unreinforced structures (e.g. wood stud construction).

Posted by 11A5S 2004-04-23 9:36:59 AM|| 2004-04-23 9:36:59 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 11A58, I appreciate your knowledge and information. Before I posted this I did view the photographs of the Saudi building with this comparison in mind. I had the impresssion that the Saudi buildings were not as solidly built as the Murrah building.

I wrote and posted these articles in order to get useful feedback such as yours. I also appreciate the forum that Rantburg provided. I don't intend to write any more on this subject.

Posted by Mike Sylwester 2004-04-23 9:49:35 AM|| 2004-04-23 9:49:35 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 Watched one of those engineering disaster shows on Learning Channel a few years back. They did a indepth examination of this collapse. Found that the Murrah Building had a design flaw. Structure depended on gravity to keep load from upper floors straight down on the cross members.The structure didn't have a strong enough joint holding columns to cross members. The blast kicked cross members on first floor off the vertical column, then gravity brought the upper floors down like a house of cards.

Posted by Steve 2004-04-23 9:51:12 AM|| 2004-04-23 9:51:12 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 Speaking as an associate editor here, Mike, you've done a great job on this, and I appreciate it.

Posted by Steve White 2004-04-23 11:38:44 AM|| 2004-04-23 11:38:44 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 Speaking as a netizen of Rantburg, Mike S. I also appreciate all the time and effort you've put into this series.

Posted by Seafarious 2004-04-23 11:42:49 AM|| 2004-04-23 11:42:49 AM|| Front Page Top

#7 Hi Mike: I liked the article. I'd just leave the explosive conspiracy stuff out. It just doesn't check out. I'd read the link I posted. It's not just the blast wave. The ground transmits energy too and blast waves can be reflected and combine and subtract for surreal effects. Nobel's brother was standing next to him during an accidental explosion. The brother was killed. Nobel didn't have a scratch. He was standing in a dead spot.

Posted by 11A5S 2004-04-23 11:43:20 AM|| 2004-04-23 11:43:20 AM|| Front Page Top

#8
I have to say that the removal of the explosive argument (you've convinced me) makes most of my previous arguments less compelling for me.

Anyone else who wants to research all this should begin and end with the book American Terrorist, which is basically McVeigh's statement that he did it alone (with some coerced help with Nichols). In my series of articles I tried to develop the idea that perhaps McVeigh himself did not know some significant factors that Nichols introduced into the events.

If McVeigh's truck did indeed suffice to blow up the building, then those other factors are rather irrelavant. Maybe Nichols did inform a "Yousef group" that then showed up to watch, but those watchers were probably not involved actively.

There are many, many eyewitness reports of other people and other trucks, but they don't stand up very well against American Terrorist.

Anyway, I did want to develop this idea, and I was looking for a forum, and when I found Rantburg, I felt this was the perfect place for me to be.

Posted by Mike Sylwester 2004-04-23 1:29:13 PM|| 2004-04-23 1:29:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 "55.2 kPa (8 PSI) overpressure wave is considered to be highly lethal and can collapse building floors. According to paragraph 3 above, the blast wave at OK City was 200 PSI when it intersected the Murrah building facade. This is in fact greater than the overpressure needed to topple unreinforced structures (e.g. wood stud construction)."

I have no doubt that the McVeigh truck bomb could have knocked down the walls and ripped out the floors. What I'm more interested in is the failure of the columns. Specifically, the columns Partin designates as 'B3' and 'A7'. You'd need about 3,300 psi to knock fail one of these steel-reinforced concrete columns, no? And that's a conservative number, assuming bad concrete. (There was a brief concrete discussion at Rantburg last year sometime - I think it had to do with the three gorges dam.)

It doesn't help that I'm a technical ignoramus while trying to sort through this stuff. I hadn't considered the reflections or a design flaw - thanks for that information.

Posted by Pete Stanley 2004-04-23 1:56:18 PM|| 2004-04-23 1:56:18 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 What I'm more interested in is the failure of the columns.

Pete, from what I can remember on the program examining the failure of the Murrah building, the columns didn't fail. The blast wave pushed the cross members sitting on the column up and sideways, the center of the blast being lower than the joint. That kicked the crossmember off the column. The upper floor supports rested on this crossmember and when it dropped they dropped with it. The floor panels, cross members and other columns mostly stayed intact, the joints between them failed. I seem to remember them saying because this was a low velocity pressure wave, it had more of a long slow push on the cross member and more load was transmitted to the joint causing it to fail. Again, I'm doing this from memory, but it made perfect sense at the time I viewed it.

Posted by Steve 2004-04-23 2:57:35 PM|| 2004-04-23 2:57:35 PM|| Front Page Top

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