The fact remains that the WTC fires were fuel-rich, oxygen-starved blazes, and, as the excerpt from the FEMA study document clearly states:

[The] WTC fires were fuel rich (as evidenced by the thick black smoke) and thus did not reach anywhere near this upper limit of 825 degrees. In fact, the WTC fires would have burnt at, or below, temperatures typical in office fires.

I know you will continue to avoid this, but there it is in black and white - the WTC fires were at or below temperatures typical in office fires, and never has a modern steel-framed office building collapsed from fire.

Here's a brief description of the Meridian fire in Philly:

"A fire on the 22nd floor of the 38-story Meridian Bank Building, also known as One Meridian Plaza, was reported to the Philadelphia Fire Department on February 23, 1991 at approximately 2040 hours and burned for more than 19 hours. The fire caused three firefighter fatalities and injuries to 24 firefighters. The 12-alarms brought 51 engine companies, 15 ladder companies, 11 specialized units, and over 300 firefighters to the scene. It was the largest high-rise office building fire in modern American history -- completely consuming eight floors of the building -- and was controlled only when it reached a floor that was protected by automatic sprinklers."

In short, the Meridian fire burned for 19 hours, and completely consumed eight floors, yet the building did not collapse.

As I have already posted, based on real-world testing, typical office fire temperatures are far too low to weaken structural steel.

As for the fuel, it doesn't matter if there is 100 gallons or 100,000, the maximum temperatures attainable remain the same, based on the efficiency of the fuel-air mix for that particular blaze. Note too, that the garage park tests were on open-sided structures where the fires would not likely have been oxygen-starved, yet the maximum temperature attained in one test was merely 360C, and some were as low as 240C, far too low to weaken structural steel.

As for your statement:

"I notice that neither you nor any of these other conspiracy nuts have addressed the biggest hole in the "demolition" argument, which is that someone would have had to plant hundreds if not thousands of pounds of high explosive onto dozens of major redundant structural elements of an inhabited building ahead of time, and plant them exactly where the airplanes were going to hit. That this is impossible apparently fazes you not in the least."

This is another of your by-now classic Strawman arguments. If you had bothered to read the original Van Romero statement, or if you really knew anything about controlled demolitions, you'd recognize how flimsy your strawman is. All this nonsense about having the charges all over the buildings, including exactly where the planes hit, is just silly, and has no bearing on the actual art of controlled demolition.

Here a key part of Romero's statement:

"If explosions did cause the towers to collapse, the detonations could have been caused by a small amount of explosive," he said. "It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points..."

One tower completely collapsed in 9 seconds, the other in 10 - almost as if they were in free-fall.

Also supporting the controlled demolition theory is the seismic record, which evidences two sharp spikes of short duration, one for each building, immediately prior to their collapse, and measuring 2.1 and 2.3 on the Richter scale, respectively.

In addition, in the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered, weeks later, when the rubble was being cleared. Molten steel was also found beneath the ruins of WTC 7, which collapsed at 5:20 on 9-11-2001 for reasons which remain obscure.

To sum up, the best evidence indicates that the WTC fires were burning at or below temperatures typical of office or car-park fires. No modern high-rise has ever collapsed from fire. The seismic record shows short-duration, high intensity spikes immediate before the towers came down, and strange pools of molten steel were found at the base of WTC 1, 2 and 7.

All the real evidence, it would seem, points away from the WTC fires as the cause of their collapse, and toward a controlled demolition as the real culprits.

sp