is colored according to heat. It is heat energy being released as light. The lighter the color, the hotter the metal. Plain and simple. We are talking about yellow-hot molten metal here... not about plastics and debris which would burn up quickly. Besides, plastics and debris do not fall under the same category as metals in regards to light emittance when heated.
The heating of the aluminum (even if coupled with debris) to a yellow-hot color means just that: the metal was yellow-hot (1000-1200C). Period. What difference does it make if it were in a controlled environment or not? It's the temperature that is in question.
Petgoat is trying to point out that to heat the aluminum metal to this temperature would require it to "sit still" somewhere long enough for the fire to heat the metal to these temperatures-- then continue to fall out all at once.
Even if it were merely heated to the melting point (some 600C), it would pour out a silvery/grey (because of reflectivity at lower temperatures and in daylight) and pour out at roughly the same rate as the materials consumption.
The theory of melting aluminum raises one basic question: Did the fires last long enough and produce enough heat to accomplish this?
The answer in my mind is no.
The appearance of a "hot" fire that had the capacity to accomplish this had greatly diminished over time in both towers:
- A thick dark sooty smoke was pouring out of WTC2 early on-- indicative of a fire starved of fuel. The same was observed to a
lesser degree and later on in WTC1. *This raises the question as to why WTC2 would fall first. Maybe they needed to quickly
cover up the appearance of an element of the plan that wasn't supposed to be seen - a thermate reaction*
- A few people were seen and photographed standing in the impact sites. If this fire was so intense as to heat aluminum to 1000C or
more, how could a person possibly survive and be seen standing mostly unscathed in the hole?
- No red hot steel was seen glowing in the gaping holes, as would be expected from a fire that could produce yellow-hot metal.
- No huge raging fires were visible after the initial fireballs and it didn't spread significantly across other
floors, as observed in other building fires.
- The fires were not hot enough to produce significant window breakage in either tower.
- At least 18 survivors evacuated from above the crash zone of the South Tower through a stairwell that passed through the crash
zone. None of the survivors reported great heat around the crash zone.
- Firefighters had reached the 78th floor sky lobby of the South Tower and were enacting a plan to evacuate people and put out
the "two pockets of fire" they found, just before the tower was destroyed.
And finally as 9-11 Research states:
As an exercise let's set aside all of the evidence about the actual severity of the Twin Towers' fires, and imagine that the fires were incredibly intense and widespread. Let's imagine that the jets were full tankers and spilled 80,000 gallons of fuel into each tower. Let's imagine that there was a strong wind giving the fires plenty of air. Let's imagine that the the fires engulfed over 10 floors in each tower, saturating the capacity of the steel buildings to draw away the heat. Let's imagine the fires burned intensely for hours, completely gutting several stories of each tower. Would that cause them to collapse? Not according to people who have studied steel structures subjected to such stresses. The following passage is from Appendix A of FEMA's World Trade Center Building Performance Study.
"In the mid-1990s British Steel and the Building Research Establishment performed a series of six experiments at Cardington to investigate the behavior of steel frame buildings. These experiments were conducted in a simulated, eight-story building. Secondary steel beams were not protected. Despite the temperature of the steel beams reaching 800-900º C (1,500-1,700º F) in three of the tests (well above the traditionally assumed critical temperature of 600º C (1,100º F), no collapse was observed in any of the six experiments)."
At temperatures above 800º C structural steel loses 90 percent of its strength. Yet even when steel structures are heated to those temperatures, they never disintegrate into piles of rubble, as did the Twin Towers and Building 7. Why couldn't such dramatic reductions in the strength of the steel precipitate such total collapse events?
- High-rise buildings are over-engineered to have strength many times greater than would needed to survive the most extreme
conditions anticipated. It may take well over a ten-fold reduction in strength to cause a structural failure.
- If a steel structure does experience a collapse due to extreme temperatures, the collapse tends to remain localized to the area
that experienced the high temperatures.
- The kind of low-carbon steel used in buildings and automobiles bends rather than shatters. If part of a structure is compromised
by extreme temperatures, it may bend in that region, conceivably causing a large part of the structure to sag or even topple.
However, there is no example of a steel structure crumbling into many pieces because of any combination of structural damage and
heating, outside of the alleged cases of the Twin Towers and Building 7.
In my mind, the OCT still doesn't seem to explain how temperatures in those fires could have possibly heated aluminum to yellow-hot color then pour out as seen in that video. They just didn't last long enough and have the required heat to accomplish this.