Alex Jones, really that stupid or just trolling?

If I remember right WTC 7 was damaged and needed to be demolished. I assume that was done by professionals considering parts of it stayed up. The only conspiracy I heard about that was there were government records that were never evacuated and were destroyed in the fires and demolition of that building. WTC 7 was not the two tall buildings which collapsed.

I did. Let me quote it:

Now, let me quote my own post in response to it:

Forget conspiracy theories. Do you still believe that there were explosives built into the Towers?

Ah, 9/11. Simpler times.

WTC 7 was much shorter than the Towers (about 50 stories, I believe) and did sustain enough damage to require demolition. It has since been rebuilt. IIRC, it and #6 were the only buildings still occupied by government offices. (The Towers had originally been intended as government offices - city, state, and federal; I worked briefly in one of the NYS offices in 1977 - but they were not sustainable, and were gradually filled by brokerages [including the tragic Cantor Fitzgerald], retail spaces, etc.)

If you watch any of the footage from that day, you'll see just how rapidly the destruction occurred. The goal was to evacuate people as quickly as possible. My guess is that whatever files in #7 survived the fires, the falling debris, and the water damage afterward would have been unsalvageable. But there was certainly no time for anyone to grab an armful of files or a computer (remember those old-fashioned tower computers?) on their way down the stairs in the dark.

It's funny. I'm rewatching Argo (based on the true story of how six of the American hostages in Tehran were smuggled out of the country in 1980). Like 9/11, it puts today's events in perspective.

WTC7 was not demolished. It collapsed after tons of flaming debris fell on it from above and started fires throughout the structure.

Completely unrelated, I watched Motherless Brooklyn over the weekend and thought that you might like it.

Don't know how I missed this one. Edward Norton is good in whatever he does. This goes on my watchlist. Thanks!

Someone ran the numbers in the days after 9/11 about the amount of energy that was released when the Twin Towers fell. I don't remember the exact figures, but it was pushing Hiroshima/Nagasaki levels for what would have been transmitted to the ground. It seems surprising that more buildings didn't fall that day.

Thank you. It's been a while. You're right - 7 collapsed. Guess I was thinking of 4, 5, and 6. Irreparable, but parts of them were still standing.

I remember at the time there were seismology reports indicating it was equivalent to a 2.0 earthquake.

Actually, had someone thought about it they might have been able to grab the RAID drives from a server. I doubt that it would have been a concern as anything would have been mirrored at another location. I had worked with servers before that and you would not have needed the entire server, and the hot swapable drives would not have been damaged by pulling them from a server while working. Someone would have had to know exactly what server to pull from, and they might have been able to do it. However, that would have been extremely unlikely. More than likely any data would have been mirrored elsewhere, or at least recent copies backed up. It would have been anything else that was physical and present that would have been destroyed. I doubt they lost much stored data.

I remember hearing stories about molten metal beneath the surface days later. I imagine the stress on the steel just super heated it if that was the case.

I am still amazed that through all of that some people at the bottom of the stairwell survived the full collapse.

Okay, so if the data were mirrored elsewhere, there'd have been no need to grab anything onsite... considering that the building was collapsing around and under them.

One of those people was a friend of my daughter's who was with the FDNY. He was guiding that group of people downstairs from, IIRC, the 11th floor when the stairway collapsed out from under them. He remembers being pulled out of the wreckage, not a scratch on him (a lot of gunk in his lungs, though, that he was coughing up for days afterward); doesn't remember how he got there. But everyone he was leading out made it.

If silence betokens consent, may we presume that @Jenee still believes there were explosives embedded in the structures of the WTC?

No. Just times like this I feel the need to treat you like I do TLS.

SPOCK: One might have said so in the first place.

What changed your mind?