The Eclipse Photo That Made Einstein Famous

The link to more pics isn't working, at least not for me.

Ah! A coding error, fixed now. Thanks!

Somebody tell Rosie O'Donnell about this quick! Gotta be another Presidential conspiracy, cuz everybody knows that fire can't melt steel or concrete!

Cool beans!

Uh, no, Dave. This is the work of the eeeeeevil gubmint, see. Rosie says that this is only the SECOND time in all of recorded history that fire has melted steel. She's been hitting the Krispy Kremes a bit hard and might be hyperglycemic, though.

It's in Oakland, actually. We gotta keep it straight, my East Bay peeps are the ones who melted the freeway...

Good stuff Miss Cellania :) worth noting in your writup though - the fire caused the collapse, not an explosion. It may sound odd, but that much fuel doesn't actually explode, but it does burn very well! The fumes from spilled gas DO explode, so an almost empty gas can is much more dangerous than a full one.

The loads on connecting bolts are much higher here than in WTC buildings - a 30m + span of freeway connected to too pillars at one end as opposed to floor sections connected to outer walls and central columns all around outer + inner perimeter. Any distortion is therefore magnified by the enormous weight of the road section - basically this thing sagged a bit and slipped off its supports (which are left standing - bet they'll just stick a new bit of road onto them). Lighter weight floor sections with evenly distributed bracing are far less liable to this kind of collapse.

More importantly, though, where's the pancake effect? This thing just flopped down onto the freeway below - which remained standing so that the fire dept. could walk along it with hoses etc. But the drop was much more than that between floors of WTC, and the mass of the collapsed span enormously greater than a falling bit of floor.
So I honestly don't think this validates any official explanation for Trade Center collapses