Creative Speculation

"“steel – which has a melting point of 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit – may weaken and bend, but does not melt during an ordinary office fire. Yet metallurgical studies on WTC steel brought back to WPI reveal that a novel phenomenon – called a eutectic reaction – occurred at the surface, causing intergranular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese.”"

"“A one-inch column has been reduced to half-inch thickness. Its edges – which are curled like a paper scroll – have been thinned to almost razor sharpness. Gaping holes – some larger than a silver dollar – let light shine through a formerly solid steel flange. This Swiss cheese appearance shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to see distortion and bending – but not holes.”[15] "

"II-B Testimony from Other Professionals:

Leslie Robertson, a member of the engineering firm that designed the World Trade Center, said 21 days after the attack: “When we were down at the B1 level, one of the firefighters said, ‘I think you’d be interested in this,’ and they pulled up a big block of concrete and there was a, like a little river of steel, flowing.”[34]
Ron Burger, a public health advisor at the National Center for Environmental Health who arrived at Ground Zero September 12, 2001, said: “Feeling the heat, seeing the molten steel, the layers upon layers of ash, like lava, it reminded me of Mt. St. Helen’s and the thousands who fled that disaster.”[35]
In late fall 2001, Dr. Alison Geyh of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health reported: “Fires are still actively burning and the smoke is very intense. In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten steel.”[36
Joe Allbaugh, the Director of FEMA, said in an October 2001 interview on CBS: "It’s just too hot for rescuers to get into [some] areas. So we do not know yet what’s in those areas, other than very hot, molten material.”[37]
Dr. Keith Eaton reported in Structural Engineer: “They showed us many fascinating slides . . . ranging from molten metal which was still red hot weeks after the event, to 4-inch thick steel plates sheared and bent in the disaster.”
Don Carson, a hazardous materials expert from the National Operating Engineers Union, said six weeks after 9/11: “There are pieces of steel being pulled out from as far as six stories underground that are still cherry red.”[38]

II-C. Testimony from Other Credible Witnesses:

Greg Fuchek, vice president of a company that supplied computer equipment used to identify human remains, reported that “sometimes when a worker would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam would be dripping molten steel.”[39]

Sarah Atlas, of New Jersey’s Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue, arrived at Ground Zero on September 11 and reported that “fires burned and molten steel flowed in the pile of ruins still settling beneath her feet.”[40]
Tom Arterburn, writing in Waste Age, reported that the New York Department of Sanitation removed “everything from molten steel beams to human remains.”[41]

Rebuttal of Official Claims: Summary

1. The claim that no evidence of any molten steel or iron was found in any of the WTC buildings is strongly refuted by three scientific reports, one from a government agency (USGS).

2. John Gross’s claim that “no eyewitnesses said” that there was molten steel (or iron) was strongly and repeatedly contradicted.

3. The claim that molten steel or iron would be irrelevant because it could have been produced in the combustion pile: This would mean claiming, with no scientific evidence and no plausibility, that combustion in an oxygen-starved pile of rubbish could have heated steel to at least 1500°C (2800° F).

4. With regard to the NIST claim that molten steel or iron is “irrelevant to the investigation of the collapse” because “it does not provide any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers [including WTC 7] were standing”: Given the fact that the molten steel or iron in the debris could not have been produced without incendiaries or explosives, the presence of either of them indicates that some of the steel was melted before, or during, the final moments of the collapses."