Jed Rothwell wrote: > Jones Beene wrote: > >> Mark Loizeaux, now president of CDI and one of the contractors in the >> clean-up is quoted in newspaper accounts and television interviews in >> the weeks following 9/11 as seeing molten steel in the bottoms of >> elevator shafts "three, four, and five weeks" after the attack. > > I do not think he meant that it was still liquid. That's physically > impossible, as several people here have pointed out. Perhaps that is not > what you intended.
That certainly seems to be what Jones intended (sorry if I'm putting words in your mouth, Jones) because he's quoting someone -- Loizeaux -- who said exactly that. Here's a page with the quote and a little information about it. This site is by someone who thinks there was a massive coverup, and thinks Loizeaux is not to be trusted: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/moltensteel.html And here's another site, this time a "debunker" site, which doesn't distrust Loizeaux, but none the less digs into the source of the quote, along with corroborating evidence, and tries to pin down whether there really was "molten steel" or not: http://www.911myths.com/html/wtc_molten_steel.html To sum up, Loizeaux apparently did say exactly what Jones quoted him as saying, but it turns out he didn't personally *see* the molten steel, as his later statements show. Rather, he was quoting others who saw it. His quote was made in good faith as far as I can tell. None the less, it appears that both the exact times when it was seen, the exact composition of the "steel", and the degree to which it was actually "molten" may all be in doubt, if one tries to dig all the way back to the original testimony and photographic evidence. It may even be the case that underground fires, fed by random passages through the debris piles, could have been hot enough to produce the observed effects, which, despite the second and third hand testimony, may not actually have included runny liquid melted structural steel. Such melted steel which would have indicated about 2800F inside the pile, which would be truly remarkable if it were still the case 5 weeks later (was that a *ton* of thermite, did I hear you say, or was it a *megaton*?). I certainly am not in a position to conclude anything from the rather hazy testimony which seems to exist on this subject. If there's something more concrete, which pins the temperature and the date a little better, I'd love to see it.
