`Oil rig fire`

Mentioned in passing as the counter-example for "steel doesn't melt in fires" — Tom has a video of a 60-foot flame burning for four hours before the rig collapses from softening, not melting.

Come to class, ask questions. I would rather answer your question than give a lecture. There are other things on Stellar right now if you want to read things. There's an article that I wrote about six weeks after the World Trade Center collapsed, because I was so sick of reading things in the paper that were just outright wrong about the collapse of the World Trade Center. People said, oh, the fire was so hot it melted the steel. If you could melt steel that easily, we didn't need Henry Bessemer in the 1860s to teach us how to melt steel. You don't melt steel in any type of building fire. I've seen oil rigs where you have a 60-foot flame — I can show you a video of a 60-foot flame in an oil rig and the thing lasts four hours. Finally it collapses, not because the steel melted, but because it just got so hot and so weak it falls over like cooked spaghetti.