Oops. I tried to send a jpeg of the email. Looks like I'm incompetent. But I can type, so here goes nothing:

A NASA email says,
"People talk about landing with two flat tires...I did too until this came up. If both tires blew up in the wheel well (not talking thermal fuse and venting but explosive decomp due to tire and/or wheel failure) the overpressure in the wheel well will be in the 40+ psi range. The resulting loads on the gear door (a quarter million lbs) would almost cerainly blow the door off the hinges or at least send it out into the slip stream...catastrophic. Even if you could survive the heating, would the gear now deploy? And/or also, could you even reach the runway with this kind of drag?"

My 'take': If plasma burns through the rubber or if the wheel melts, the tire doesn't deflate through a safety valve; it deflates immediately and the wheel well doesn't have time to vent. The author of the email suggests that the door could burst open.

Personally, I don't think any of this matters. If plasma was flowing inside the wing and Columbia still had to shed 12000mph before becoming an airplane (so that the astronauts could bail out), then it was doomed...if the wheel well didn't blow, then the next item on a huge list of horrible events would occur.