Lab Safety Yo!

In Da Lab Homeslice

The Safety Song

Scientific Method

Building Knowledge

BACKGROUND FACTS

The more information you have, the better you can support your argument.

BUILDING THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
The twin towers opened in 1972 after two years of construction.
Thirteen square blocks were razed to house the WTC complex.
Each floor of the twin towers comprised about 50,000 square feet.
The combined weight of the towers was more than 1.5 million tons. Each tower was built to safely sway about three feet during strong windstorms.
WTC 1 was the world’s tallest building until Chicago’s Sears Tower was completed in 1973.
200,000 tons of steel were used in the construction of the WTC complex.
The WTC complex contained about 43,000 windows and 200 elevators.
About 50,000 people worked in the towers, and more than 200,000 people moved through the towers each day.


PENTAGON SPECS
The Pentagon has a floor space of 3,705,793 square feet and contains 7,754 windows and 17 miles of corridor.
Each of the Pentagon’s outer walls is 921 feet long.
The building was constructed out of reinforced concrete made from 380,000 tons of sand dredged from the Potomac River and is supported by 41,492 concrete piles. The designers’ ingenuity not only created a building that complemented the architectural style of the nation’s capital, but also saved enough steel to build an entire battleship.


ABOUT THE 9/11 CONSPIRACY
A Google search of "9/11 conspiracy" turns up 6 million hits. (The famed "JFK conspiracy" brings 52,000.)
More than 1/3 of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a 2006 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll

It was a controlled demolotion

Conspiracy: The collapse was caused by controlled demolition.

Science: The film crew recorded the demolition of a college dormitory building to learn all that is involved in the process of prepping and loading. The first step was to expose the columns in order to attach explosives to them. The World Trade Center had 47 inner core columns that would have needed to be prepared. To cut the steel beams the demolition team used a shape charge, which is piece of copper apportioned to a shape-charged weapon. When an explosive is attached and ignited, the device implodes and forms a stream of liquid copper that cuts through the steel. A demolition of this scale would leave clear evidence behind, but no such traces were found at Ground Zero.

Science vs. Conspiracy 9/11

THE COLLAPSE OF THE BUILDINGS

Official Story: The collapse was caused by fire initially fed by the jet fuel from the planes.

Testing the Official Story: Using original construction blueprints, photographs, and construction data, Purdue University, along with the American Society of Civil Engineers, created a model structure of the north World Trade Center tower and a scaled 767 jetliner. To model the fuel load, Purdue launched aluminum cans filled with liquid to represent an airline wing colliding with a steel column. The final simulation showed the internal destruction of supporting columns, the disintegration of the jetliner, the atomizing of the fuel, and the resulting fires that softened the steel framework of the building and brought it down.


Conspiracy: The fire could not have gotten hot enough to melt the steel.

Science: The Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (EMRTC) designed explosives to test the effects of burning jet fuel on steel. EMRTC used a bare steel beam because the National Institute of Standards and Technology reports that much of the any fireproofing material would have been knocked off at the moment of impact. Within two minutes of igniting the fuel, the temperature peaked just above 2,000 Fahrenheit and complete structural failure occurred in less than four minutes.