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In the documentary World Trade Center: Anatomy of the Collapse, Jonathan Barnett, Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute states, "When steel is bare -- when it heats up -- it gets weaker. It's not that it melts in a fire, in fact, fires--normal fires--are not hot enough to melt steel. Even if you were, for example, to use an unusual fuel -- like kerosene -- you cannot achieve temperatures hot enough to melt steel." He then adds, "In over 20 years I have not seen -- until recently -- a protected steel structure that has collapsed in a fire."
Professor Barnett also appeared in PBS/Nova's Why The Towers Fell, and stated: "We have a long history of successful steel construction in this country and, in fact, the world. And one of the great successes is that under normal fire conditions we don't have building collapse. In fact, until 9/11, I was unaware of any protected steel structure that had collapsed anywhere in the world from just a fire."
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| Professor Jonathan Barnett was a core member of the ASCE/FEMA Building Performance Assessment Team which concluded that fire alone could not have lead to the total collapse of the World Trade Center towers. |
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More on the FEMA Building Performance Assessment:
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READ FEMA.gov: FEMA Publication 403, World Trade Center Building Performance Study: Data Collection, Preliminary Observations, and Recommendations
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