Slide #17 - Very Different Characteristics

The Argument Begins

With this slide, Richard Gage introduces the notion that all types of destroyed buildings have "very different identifiable sets of characteristics." Building collapses are like fingerprints in Gage's argument. In logical terms, there is an if and only if relationship between these "sets of characteristics" and the building collapses they describe.

Gage needs you to accept this because his main error throughout this presentation is affirming the consequent. His noted characteristics do not imply what he's claiming.

And the only apparent authority that Gage is presenting to back up this claim is his own. His speaking style shows him to be a serious and mild-mannered person. He's backed himself up with various polls and other important people. Why shouldn't you accept what he's saying at face value?

Because what he is saying is pure poppycock.

Two Categories, One Picture

For example, in the top right hand corner of this slide, there is a picture that Gage has labeled Topple (Earthquake). In the very next slide, Gage will classify the same picture as Collapsed, in opposition to the label Fell Over.

Now which is it? If these characteristics are so distinguishable, why has Gage put the same picture into different categories?

Characteristic Features of Destruction by Fire

Gage brings this up in his talk at this point. Here are the points he listed in the online version of this talk:

Fires by their nature tend to creep from place to place, as they run out of fuel and find fresh fuel sources, leaving behind the burned out areas to cool.

Now when collapses do occur, and they have never in a high-rise office building, but for instance in wood buildings, they begin gradually and asymmetrically, with large, visible, slow deformations.

All of this actually happens in the 3 WTC buildings. As large as the initial fires were, the towers were larger, giving the fires plenty of creep room. Modern buildings (including the WTC buildings) are designed to deal with this creeping phenomenon, but the fires on 9/11 were immense, and started over huge areas of the buildings. No design could accommodate these fires.

The buildings also fell asymmetrically. The upper sections of both towers fell to the south before building enough momentum to overwhelm the ability of the structure below to support them. 7 World Trade also slumped to the south as it fell.

Each of the three WTC buildings also showed large, visible, and slow deformations.

Here are the deforming perimeter columns on the east side of the South Tower:

And here are the deforming perimeter columns on the south side of the North Tower (the small white lines show the various depths of the deformation):

FDNY Deputy Chief Peter Hayden described the deformation seen in the structure of 7 World Trade:

...also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o'clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o'clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.

A transit is a special telescope that allows you to precisely record the angles at which it, the transit, is viewing a distant object. What the FDNY did was point a transit at a specific point on Building 7 (the noticeable bulge) and record the angles. A few minutes later, they could realign the transit to the same point, record the new angles, and then triangulate how quickly the building was deforming.

Without exception, Gage is wrong. These buildings fell due to a combination of crippling damage to unusual structures and fire.

The CD Characteristic Gage Never Mentions

In every clip of a controlled demolition I've seen, the building breaks up into multiple large segments before collapsing, like a birthday cake being cut into servings. This is clearly seen in the following controlled demolition of the Tencza Apartments in Arlington, Virginia:

YouTube: Tencza Apartments Falls Apart in Sections

You can even see this in the video from which Gage took his upper middle picture, the one of the controlled demolition. It's available on the next slide. As the building falls, the corner closest to us falls a bit and then stops. The building smashes down around it, but it isn't breaking loose. It's already been detached from the rest of the building in a great chunk.

None of the buildings in question on 9/11 demonstrate this feature. The towers were among the largest buildings on earth, and should have been broken up into huge pieces by a controlled demolition. Yet the upper sections of the towers simply smash down and tear the structure below into shreds

In the last seconds of its progressive collapse, Building 7 (or what's left of it) appears to fall as an entire unit. It's remarkable how the northern facade lies unbroken over the top of the debris, just like a toppled building.

And the larger the structure, the larger and more numerous the segments. Here's a link to the controlled demolition of the Landmark Building in Fort Worth. As it falls, you can see it slide apart in the segments created by the explosive blasts.

This is clearly a characteristic feature of controlled demolition as opposed to a building that just topples over, remaining in one huge piece. And yet Gage doesn't mention this and will never mention it. Why?

Because he's the one that decided on the list of "controlled demolition characteristic features." And since this one didn't happen with the three WTC buildings on 9/11, Gage left it off his list.

"You Tend To See A Whole Lot of Pancakes"

Gage makes this statement during his lecture. The first thing to absolutely make clear is this: NIST specifically says that it is not using pancaking for its explanation of the collapse of the towers.

NIST's findings do not support the "pancake theory" of collapse, which is premised on a progressive failure of the floor systems in the WTC towers (the composite floor system - that connected the core columns and the perimeter columns - consisted of a grid of steel "trusses" integrated with a concrete slab; see diagram below). Instead, the NIST investigation showed conclusively that the failure of the inwardly bowed perimeter columns initiated collapse and that the occurrence of this inward bowing required the sagging floors to remain connected to the columns and pull the columns inwards. Thus, the floors did not fail progressively to cause a pancaking phenomenon.

Whenever Gage describes the official story as being pancaking, he is building a straw man. He is misrepresenting the positions he's arguing against. This is an important distinction to understand when evaluating some other claims that Gage makes.

However, as the collapse itself progressed, we should expect some pancaking to happen. After the collapse started, the floors then would have slammed into each other. Gage is right about this, but he denies that there was any evidence of pancaked floors in the debris pile.

The truth is, that evidence was all over the place. The immense force pressed these floors together so fiercely that they compressed them into tight layers.

And Gage will show you these pancaked floors himself. He won't call them "pancakes," but you can recognize them easily. They are usually referred to as "meteorites."

This exact picture will be seen in Gage's video slide #181/182.

These chunks of debris were found in the Pile at Ground Zero. You can see the distinct layers of rust. These are several floors "pancaked" together. They are described at amNY.com (start at image 31):

Large pieces of debris, likened to meteorites by preservationists, are actually several floors of the towers compressed together as the buildings collapsed. Furniture, twisted metal, pipes, cords and even papers with legible type are visible. The pieces are kept in a humidity-controlled tent in Hangar 17 of Kennedy International Airport.

Gage tells us that he will be "looking" for this evidence, and indeed, he has it! But because he's not really looking, he doesn't see.

In fact, there are pictures available of the layered debris in place at Ground Zero, and I'll reproduce them as Gage repeats his baseless claim.

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