Ring of Fire

By now I'm sure you've heard of the conflagration on a San Francisco area highway that resulted in the collapse of a reinforced concrete and steel roadway. It started when a tanker trucker carrying 8,600 gallons of gasoline was going too fast on the ramp and crashed. The resulting fire was hot enough to degrade the steel and cause a collapse of the roadway.

The roadway will be shut for weeks and traffic in the area will be a nightmare for months to come.

This incident should completely undermine the theory that fire couldn't melt steel or cause the collapse at the Twin Towers on 9/11. This is one of the principles of the conspiracy nuts who think that it took a government conspiracy and/or controlled demolition explosives to cause the collapsing towers.

Now, I know that the conspiracy kooks will never accept the fact that they're kooks. The facts just get ignored as they believe in their conspiracy.

Yet, what we have here is a real world demonstration of what happens when you have significant amounts of propellant (gasoline), a long lasting fire, and subsequent collapsing structures.

CNN reports:

Witnesses reported flames rising up to 200 feet into the air. Heat exceeded 2,750 degrees and caused the steel beams holding up the interchange from eastbound I-80 to eastbound Interstate 580 above to buckle and bolts holding the structure together to melt, leading to the collapse, California Department of Transportation director Will Kempton said.

The charred section of collapsed freeway was draped at a sharp angle onto the highway beneath, exposing a web of twisted metal beneath the concrete. Officials said that altogether a 250-yard portion of the upper roadway was damaged.

The cost of the repairs would likely run into the tens of millions of dollars, and the state was seeking federal disaster aid, Kempton said. Schwarzenegger late Sunday issued an emergency declaration to allow repairs to happen faster, said Adam Mendelsohn, the governor's spokesman.

That's similar to what happened at the WTC, as steel trusses were warped by the heat and sections collapsed causing a progressive collapse at and above the impact areas - bringing down the towers.