Putting 2 and 2 together

In a previous post, I wondered about why the WTC buildings pulverized into dust rather than collapsing into big chunks of concrete and rebar. And I pondered the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Now it occurs to me that the way that bridge collapsed provides further evidence that something other than gravity brought down the WTC.

The I-35W bridge was approximately 64 feet above the river below. That's the equivalent of 5 to 6 stories high. And when concrete and steel fall that far, it remained almost entirely intact. It fell in huge chunks, and it did not turn to dust at all. Obviously the World Trade Center is much higher--110 floors and 1368 feet in all. (12 feet per floor. But the individual floors fell onto the floor below, pancaking, as we are told. So each floor was falling only 12 feet at a time. When a slab of concrete falls 12 feet, it does not crumble to dust. It falls in maybe 2 or 3 or 6 large chunks. And then the next floor falls, again only 12 feet, and there is more weight and there would be more fracturing, and so on. (And it seems certain that fire, no matter how hot, would not turn steel and concrete to fine powder either.)

If the powder occurred at the ground level, after the top floor had jounced down 109 times, breaking up more and more as it went, then perhaps we could credit that the effect of gravity had crumbled the top floors to dust. But in the pictures, we can see clouds of dust roiling out of the building long before it reaches the ground. The building vanished before our eyes and was reduced to a fine powder.

We now know for certain that chunks of concrete remain intact when they fall 6 stories down. Let's assume that these large slabs fell another 6 stories. Would they be talcum-like dust yet? No? Another 6 or 12 stories? Would they even be brick size chunks? Remember, we saw with our own eyes this week that after the first 6-story fall, the slabs of concrete remain almost 100% intact.

We also know that human beings are not broken into tiny bits by such a fall either. Almost everyone survived a 60 foot fall. And we know from the space shuttle and from accidents in which parachutes fail to open that human bodies can fall not only 1300 feet but 10 times that, 13,000 feet, and not disintegrate. (In fact, people have *survived* falls from airplanes without a parachute!) Now of course, a human being standing on the 50th floor of the WTC is about to be hit by 60 floors of concrete before falling the final 50 floors down, so of course, we would expect any human remains to be crushed and mangled, perhaps beyond recognition. But we would not expect that body to be vaporized or turned to dust.

So I am forced to wonder if the WTC was blown apart by something other than fire and gravity.