The plumes of bluish smoke that rose for weeks from the rubble of the destroyed World Trade Center contained unprecedented amounts of toxic ultra-fine particles which are created only when metal boils.
Why Did Iron Boil beneath the Rubble?
6 May 2006
The plumes of bluish smoke that rose for weeks from the rubble of the
destroyed World Trade Center contained unprecedented amounts of toxic ultra-fine
particles which are created only when metal boils.
DAVIS, California -- In the days after 9-11, when he saw the light bluish smoke
rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center, Thomas A. Cahill, an expert on
airborne aerosols and director of the DELTA Group at the University of
California at Davis, knew the plumes contained large amounts of the very
smallest particles, the extremely toxic ultra-fine particles less than 1
one-millionth of a meter in size, and smaller. Unlike the much larger dust
particles from the destruction of the twin towers, these ultra-fine and nano-particles
are particularly hazardous because of their extremely small size, which allows
them to pass throughout the body and penetrate into the nucleus of the human
cell.
In the end of September 2001, Robert Leifer, a colleague from the Department of
Energy's Environmental Measurement Laboratory in New York City contacted Cahill
and asked him to send one of the DELTA Group's air monitoring devices known as
the 8-stage rotating drum impactor. By October 2, 2001, the Davis air
monitoring unit was set up on the lab's roof at 201 Varick Street at the edge of
the "exclusion zone," about one mile north of the smoking rubble of the WTC. On
top of the 12-story building, the unit was at an elevation of about 150 feet
above street level, but lower than most of the surrounding buildings. The
exclusion zone was the area around the WTC which had no electricity as a result
of the destruction of the power plant that had existed under WTC 7. Cahill's
air sampling began on October 2 and continued until late December, when the last
fires were finally extinguished.
Asked why it took so long to begin a scientific evaluation of the air
contamination that accompanied the destruction of the WTC, Cahill said he had
assumed that there were scores of agencies and scientists monitoring the air
quality in New York City after 9-11. "I assumed it was happening. I could not
believe it was not," Cahill said. "It [the Davis drum] was all by itself. The
EPA did nothing."
When Cahill went to New York City in January 2002, rather than welcome his
effort to evaluate the toxicity of the city's air, an official with the regional
office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had but two questions for
him: Who asked you to do it? Who's paying for it?
While Christine Todd Whitman, then administrator of the EPA, told New Yorkers
that the air was safe to breathe in the days and weeks after 9-11, Cahill said
there were enormous violations of standards that jeopardized the health of
anyone exposed to the plumes coming from the rubble. Those most affected by the
toxic smoke were the thousands of workers who labored on top of the rubble pile,
he said.
In January, James Zadroga, a 34 year-old detective with the NYPD died of lung
disease and mercury poisoning. Zadroga had spent hundreds of hours at Ground
Zero working on recovery and cleanup at the site.
The conditions were "brutal" for people working at Ground Zero without
respirators and slightly less so for those working or living in adjacent
buildings, Cahill, a professor emeritus of physics and atmospheric science,
said. "It was like they were working inside the stack of an incinerator," he
said. "The debris pile acted like a chemical factory. It cooked together the
components of the buildings and their contents, including enormous numbers of
computers, and gave off gases of toxic metals, acids and organics for at least 6
weeks," he said.
The DELTA Group's work revealed the presence of extremely small metallic
aerosols in unprecedented amounts in the plumes coming from the burning WTC
rubble. Most of the particles in these plumes were in the category of the
smallest ultra-fine and nano-particles: from 0.26 to 0.09 microns. The
extraordinarily high level of ultra-fine aerosols was one of the most unusual
aspects of the data, Cahill said. "Ultra-fine particles require extremely high
temperatures," Cahill said, "namely the boiling point of the metal."
While Cahill said he was not aware of evidence confirming the existence of
molten metal in the rubble of the WTC, his data showing high levels of
ultra-fine particles in the smoke plume prove that incredibly intense hot spots,
capable of boiling and vaporizing metals and other components from the debris,
persisted beneath the rubble for weeks.
"As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel
was still running," Leslie Robertson, structural engineer responsible for the
design of the WTC, said at the National Conference of Structural Engineers on
October 5, 2001.
I reported in 2002 that pools of "literally molten steel" were seen in the
basements of the collapsed twin towers and WTC 7 by contractors hired to remove
the rubble. The official reports by NIST, FEMA, and the 9-11 Commission,
however, omit any mention of the large quantities of molten metal observed in
the basement areas of WTC 7 and the towers.
"The official reports do not adequately address the issue of molten metal found
at the sites," Professor of Physics Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University
says, adding that this fact alone "provides compelling motivation for continued
research on the WTC collapses."
Jones is the author of a scientific paper entitled "Why Indeed Did the WTC
Buildings Collapse?" which posits an hypothesis, based on the physical and
photographic evidence from the WTC, that aluminothermic steel cutting charges,
such as Thermite, were used to cut the core columns in order to initiate the
collapses of the three steel framed high-rise towers that fell on 9-11. Thermite
reactions produce extremely high temperatures and create molten iron and
aluminum oxide. Thermite at the WTC would explain the extreme hot spots that
persisted in the rubble and the large amounts of molten metal.
The official version conspicuously fails to explain what caused these intense
hot spots, which are clearly the culprits for both the ultra-fine particles
found in the plumes and the pools of molten iron found in the basement. Cahill
rules out the gravitational potential energy of the towers' collapse being the
cause of the super-intense hot spots saying their potential energy was only
capable of raising the entire mass of debris a few degrees. So why was iron
boiling in the rubble of the WTC?
Using metallographic analysis, the 2005 NIST report from the WTC determined that
there was no evidence that any of the steel samples they had examined had
reached temperatures above 600 degrees C., well below the temperature of the
red-hot pieces of metal that were seen being pulled from the rubble. However, by
the time NIST began their study nearly all of the critical steel evidence from
the WTC had already been melted down in Chinese steel mills, sold to them by
Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management (Newark, NJ) who made $2.5 million by selling
the crucial evidence of the greatest crime of mass murder in recent history to
Shanghai smelters.
Photo: These whitish-bluish plumes that rose
from the WTC rubble contained extremely large amounts of ultra-fine and nano-size
particles of metals that boiled beneath the rubble for weeks after 9-11.