"Let men be wise by instinct if they can, but when this fails be wise by good advice." -Sophocles
Showing posts with label Highway Collapse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Highway Collapse. Show all posts

Monday, April 30, 2007

Highway Collapse Disproves Sheen's 9/11 Theories

Remarkably, conspiracy theorists (Charlie Sheen being one of the more infamous) continue to assert despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the World Trade Center towers were brought down on 9/11 by demolition explosives cunningly pre-placed by the Bush administration to provide justification for future warmongering. These conspiracy buffs claim that flying jets into the towers could not possibly have caused the collapses and that the conclusions investigating engineers reached were wrong about superheated jet fuel melting steel beams, leading to the collapses. So insinstent are these conspiracy theorists, that Sheen is narrating an upcoming documentary exploring "what really happened" on 9/11.

On Sunday, a traffic accident at the interchange of three highways near the Bay Bridge in Oakland, California, served as a vivid illustration that 9/11 conspiracy buffs should have paid closer attention in their science classes. A tanker truck carrying 8600 gallons of gasoline crashed into a pylon and burst into flames, spewing gasoline onto the highway interchange. As that gasoline ignited and spread the fire across the pavement, the following occurred (sorry Charlie Sheen, et al), even without “evil Bush administration demolition charges”:

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.

Extreme temperatures created by burning fuel, steel beams buckling, metal bolts melting, structures collapsing. Sounds a lot like what happened with all that jet fuel from the nearly full tanks of the planes used on 9/11, doesn’t it? As damaging as this tanker accident is to commuting and trucking in the Bay area, it will hopefully stand as a witness to nutty conspiracy advocates (many of whom ironically happen to reside in the Bay area) that catastrophes can and do happen regularly without the prior knowledge or participation of anyone from the Bush administration. My stopwatch is ticking, recording how long it will take for Spike Lee to produce a “documentary” asserting that the Army Corps of Engineers, complicit with the Bush Administration, blew up this interchange like the levees of New Orleans.

--Photos by AP, Fox News.