Why Didn't Millions of Gallons of Water Put Out the Ground Zero Fires?

4 million gallons of water were dropped on Ground Zero within the first 10 days after September 11, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories:

Approximately three million gallons of water were hosed on site in the fire-fighting efforts, and 1 million gallons fell as rainwater, between 9/11 and 9/21 ....

The spraying continued for months afterward (the 10 day period was simply the timeframe in which the DOE was sampling). Enormous amounts of water were hosed on Ground Zero continuously, day and night:

"firetrucks [sprayed] a nearly constant jet of water on [ground zero]. You couldn't even begin to imagine how much water was pumped in there," said Tom Manley of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the largest fire department union. "It was like you were creating a giant lake."

This photograph may capture a sense of how wet the ground became due to the constant spraying:


Moreover, the fires were sprayed with thousands of gallons of high tech fire-retardants.

And yet, the world trade center fire was "the longest-burning structural fire in history". The temperatures were so high that there was molten metal at ground zero for months after 9/11.

Why didn't the enormous quantities of water and fire-retardant sprayed at Ground Zero put out the fires? How could fires and molten metal have burned for months, when fires from normal office and building materials and available sources of oxygen should have been doused by all of the water?

Dr. Steven Jones gives one possibility:

"Thermite contains its own supply of oxygen and so the reaction cannot be smothered, even with water".

For proof of the fact that thermite contains its own oxygen supply and burns under water, see this web page.

Admittedly, Ground Zero is a large area: 16 acres. However, the hot spots were very localized, at least within days of 9/11, as the following thermal image shows:



The majority of water should have been sprayed at the hottest spots in an attempt to put out the fires.

Yet, after five days of cooling and despite being sprayed with massive amounts of water, the surface hot spots were still above the melting point of aluminum. How is that possible?

In addition, the sheer weight of all of the material which fell on Ground Zero should also have helped put out the fires. 60 Minutes and Mt. Sinai Medical Center both reported that the destruction of the Twin Towers dumped at least a million tons of pulverized material, primarily concrete, onto Ground Zero and the surrounding areas (for example, see these photos). While a good proportion of the dust blew away from Ground Zero, that still leaves perhaps hundreds of thousands of tons of dust at ground zero itself.

Virtually the entire site became covered with dust and dirt. As one rescue worker put it:

"Everything was one color, some of it was wet, some of it was dry - don't forget they hosed the site down constantly . . . the longer we were there and the deeper we got into the pile the debris was almost like topsoil. Everything was covered with gray dust and dirt."

What happens when you pour dirt onto a campfire? It goes out.

Water is also heavy, as anyone who has picked up a 5-gallon water bottle can attest (it weighs 8.33 pounds per gallon). Because 4 million gallons of water fell on Ground Zero within the first 10 days, that means that some 33 million pounds, or more than 14,000 tons, of water were added within a week and a half to the hundreds of thousands of tons of dust at ground zero. The spraying continued for months, which means that hundreds of thousands of tons of water would have been dumped on Ground Zero over the next couple of months.

Thus, in addition to the fire-dousing property of water, it seems that the enormous weight of dust and water should have also helped to smother any normal fires. There simply could not have been enough oxygen to sustain the fires and molten metal for months. And the high tech fire-retardants should have put out any fires the water and dust didn't.

The extreme difficulty in drowning or smothering the fires for months supports the evidence for controlled demolition provided by the fact that temperatures at the Trade Centers were hotter than they could have been due to mere office fires in the first place.