Oklahoma oil derrick blowout fire

To give you an example of some of the things I just said: I was asked in late September of 2001, right after 9/11, by the editor of a metallurgical journal if I would write an article. Actually he didn't ask me, he asked Professor Clark, and Professor Clark said, "Oh, you ought to get Professor Eagar to do it." So he asked me, and I was so sick and tired of reading newspaper accounts about how the steel melted in the fire of the airplanes. Anyone who's ever been to a fire scene knows that steel doesn't melt in a fire. If steel melted in a fire, why did we need Sir Henry Bessemer in 1856 to tell us how to melt steel? The typical temperature of a fire is about 1,000° centigrade. Steel melts at 1500. I've seen a steel derrick where they had a blowout at 10,000 PSI of natural gas from a gas well in Oklahoma, and it catches on fire for three days, and the flames are 300 feet in the air, and the whole derrick is engulfed in flames for three days, and the steel didn't even transform to austenite above 900 centigrade. And I'm reading these great scholars, the newspaper reporters, talking about — or they interview great experts — "Well, the steel melted in the fire."