Reply #88: Here's an interesting article that I posted here a couple of years ago [View All]

[Old and In the Way]

"What Goes Up, must come down"

got this special US News and World Report last Christmas. The Magazine was called "Secrets of the Master Builders". The last article, whose title is noted above was quite interesting. It's been sitting in the bathroom and I finally got around to reading this article today.

Anyway, there were 2 interesting paragraphs I thought I'd share.

"The tools of the destructor's trade range from standard dynamite, used to shatter concrete, to linear shaped charges that concentrate the force of the blast. Shaped charges use a high explosive called RDX, slicing through steel with millions of pounds pf pressure per square inch. In 2001 project, for example, a New York gas storage tank built with 5 million pounds of steel took a mere 80 pounds of shaped charges to come down.

And this unrelated paragraph in the same story:

"The Murrah building was but a prelude to the greater disaster on Sept. 11, 2001. Like most Americans, the Loizeaux's {my note: family business is Controlled Demolition International} were transfixed by the televised destruction shortly after the first jet struck the World Trade Center. But they knew then what few Americans realized, or dared to contemplate. "I told Doug immediately that the tower was coming down, and when the second tower was hit, that it would follow," remembers Mark. "I was familiar with the buildings structure, and with all that jet fuel and the massive amount of combustibles, a catastrophic failure was inevitable."