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Re: Fun Facts All Americans Should Know...

I do have some engineering background. What failed first were the lightweight trusses between the beams. Go into most supermarkets or a Walmart and look at the ceiling. The trusses are the steel members that look like triangles with a steel member top and bottom. They are designed to be lightweight to make the building more open. But they are much lighter guage construction that the post and beams they sit on. They heat up, they become pliable and then they sag in the middle. The ends only rest a few inches on the beam, it would not take much movement for one end to come off. Lose a few and it is domino's. That whole concept of the lightweight steel frame is it is a system, and if you compromise any part of it, the whole system fails. The trusses for all intents and purposes supports the weight of the concrete floor and most of the interior walls and furnishings. The post and beams support the trusses. Take out the truss the floor collapses and the weight of the floor collapse pancakes the floor under it that also had sagging trusses and by the time you get down to floors with no fire you have a huge sledge hammer of dead weight from the top floors and away you go. The forces involved are huge.

And if you need more proof that this is a known issue with lightweight truss design, ask a fire fighter what they mean when they say "don't trust a truss". This scenario happens all over the place, just not a spectacularly.
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Posted in reply to: Re: Fun Facts All Americans Should Know... by drifterdawg
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