9/11 Link To Saudi Arabia Is Topic Of 28 Redacted Pages In Government Report; Congressmen Push For R

[AZCat]

280. I don't remember saying I agreed with the NIST.

While the engineering community doesn't question the "planes/fire" cause of the collapses, there are still plenty of things to squabble about. It's been a looooooong time since the NIST's recommendations to the various building code/standard organizations were produced and my memory isn't good enough to recall all the details, but there was plenty of vigorous debate over the particulars. A good deal of this questioning was driven by independent work that resulted in different conclusions. Again, the devil is in the details - nobody was seriously quibbling about the "planes/fire" thing.

The reality is that the impacts, subsequent fires and damage, and the collapses were complicated, nonlinear time-dependent events that are pretty much impossible to replicate, even considering the sophisticated computer models of today. That means a lot of guesswork has to go into the models, and your specific sequence of events depends strongly on the assumptions you make when creating the models. Different groups make different assumptions, and therefore get different results (usually with different tools, as well). But in the end, they all lead to a global runaway collapse.

Would it be interesting to look at the NIST's data? Sure, but it's no better than anyone else's (except maybe more detailed).