For anyone in Berkeley tomorrow, 9/11 - Astaneh-Asl Speaks

[BigAl]

This just came in over the transom. Maybe someone in Berkeley will find it interesting and can attend and submit a trip report. There is a bit of information on his web site that I haven't read yet.

You are cordially invited to the World Trade Center 8th Annual
Memorial Lecture:

The World Trade Center
A Remembrance and a Summary of Results
of a 5-Year Structural Engineering Investigation

By Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, Ph.D., P.E., (www.astaneh.net)
Professor, Department of Civil & Env. Engineering,
University of California, Berkeley

Friday, September 11 3:30-5:00PM
502 Davis Hall, UC Berkeley Campus

Very few people are aware of the fact that the WTC towers did not need to follow any design code and did not need to obtain the construction permit from the City. The structural system used in the towers was an unusual system of "Steel Exterior Bearing Walls and Interior Compression Columns" with no framing system in between. During this lecture, the focus will be on the results of a five- years studies of the structural aspects of the WTC design and the collapse. The 5-year analysis primarily focused on finding an answer to the question of: "What would have happened if instead of the unusual and relatively light bearing wall structural system with no framing, used in the WTC towers, a more traditional and code-based system of structural framing, used in other structure, was used?"

The results presented here will show that if the towers were designed following the code and using the traditional structural framing systems used in almost any other building structure, such as moment frames, braced frames, shear walls or tube systems, instead of the unique and unusual system used in the collapsed WTC towers, the terrorist attacks most likely would have resulted in only local damage and not complete and catastrophic collapse of both towers where 3,000 people who were trapped in them perished. It must be stated that those 19 murderers who flew the passenger planes into the WTC Towers and their organizers and backers are fully and directly responsible for this murderous act. However, by learning from this criminal act, it is hoped that we can prevent these criminals in the future from committing mass-murder using our structures.
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The Honorary Sponsor: Skyscrapers Safety Campaign (www.skyscrapersafety.org)

[Sam.I.Am]

I can't go into Bezerkley. My head might explode...

[dudalb]

Sounds like an engineer with a personal agenda.. No conspiracy angle, though.

[CHF]

Should be an interesting talk. This engineer basically looks at the unique design of the WTC - something most truthers are completely unaware of.

[parky76]

yeah, Ive thought about this. what if the WTC towers were built like typical steel structures? they most likely would not have collapsed..or at least completely collapsed.

oh well, monday morning quarterbacking.

[DGM]

yeah, Ive thought about this. what if the WTC towers were built like typical steel structures? they most likely would not have collapsed..or at least completely collapsed.

oh well, monday morning quarterbacking.
They never would have been built in the first place. Way too expensive.

[oldhat]

This sounds pretty boring and it's during work hours but I'll skip out on work early only if someone promises Truthers show up and try to disrupt the lecture so I can get some juicy cell phone video.

[Brainster]

Sounds like an engineer with a personal agenda.. No conspiracy angle, though.

Astaneh-Asl makes a good point here, in my estimation. Of course, the Troofers seized on it when he first aired his findings, but it does not validate their theories or prove anything.

[Sam.I.Am]

Yeah, he's just playing "What if".

[R.Mackey]

We've discussed Dr. Astaneh-asl's commentary here plenty of times. He is definitely not a Truther, but much like Dr. Quintiere, sometimes they get desperate and quote-miney enough to claim that he supports them... for example, here (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=107390).

I've written about his position before. I'd personally back away from it a little bit -- it is correct that the Port Authority did not have to follow any particular building code, but they ginned up their own hybrid code, cribbing from various other standards that were in force at the time. NIST detailed the differences in NCSTAR1-1B and found there weren't any particularly glaring loopholes.

Of greater significance is the revolutionary design, and the fact that no one at the time knew how to fairly evaluate it. NIST, as you will recall, was rather surprised to find that the floor systems and their fire protection did not scale the way everybody thought they would, when they ran their tests as described in NCSTAR1-6B. The early certification tests were therefore inadequate. However, I don't see that even had they followed the strictest code, this defect would have been definitely caught.

For the question of how the Towers would have fared if they were more conventionally built, we can look to the experience of the Pentagon for some guidance. It was reinforced concrete, not steel, but it was a more typical post-and-beam design and one of the few other structures in history to be hit by a jetliner at speed. It also suffered a limited collapse.

My feeling on it is -- this is only an educated guess, don't read too much into it -- that had WTC 1 and WTC 2 been more typically constructed, they would have stood longer and deformed more, but would have ultimately collapsed completely anyway. WTC 7, on the other hand, I think might have burned out rather than collapsed, maybe. But since nobody was killed by WTC 7's collapse, and the impact on infrastructure was minor, I don't see that it makes all that much difference.

While I largely agree with Dr. Astaneh-asl, I think he's pushing it a little too hard. He's entitled to that. He's an educated activist, not like the dopes in the Truth Movement.

[Newtons Bit]

"What would have happened if instead of the unusual and relatively light bearing wall structural system with no framing, used in the WTC towers, a more traditional and code-based system of structural framing, used in other structure, was used?"

The WTC uses an allowable framing system by code. It's called an ordinary moment frame (OMF). There is no height restriction on this system in regions of low seismicity like NYC. It's code allowable today.

He's a P.E. in California. He should know this already.