Not sure how you came up with your calculations. However I did notice part of your problem was a lack of understanding regarding materical retaining its heat. I first saw your misunderstanding regarding the concrete being turned over.
While the blaze is starved for oxygen, the scalding steel buried
below ground will retain its heat until enough air reaches it or
water douses it.
Also I would suggest talking more to Thomas A. Cahill regarding the burning fuel.
He stated that "The, fuel oil from the WTC’s generators seeped into the ground, ignited and slowly consumed the debris stacked on top of it. As the piles were peeled open, oxygen stoked the underground fire, which burned for weeks."
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=oid:65238
I have many links regarding the fires. PM me if your intertested.
Im also going to add this link.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/nyregion/19FIRE.html
Jose Maldonado has all the basic tools: a ladder truck to lift him up and out toward the fire; a pumper to ensure nearly 800 gallons a minute is poured onto it; and his respirator, boots and other protective gear to guard against the roiling waves of heat and toxic smoke.
But as dawn turns into day and day into night, it is hard to tell if the 12 hours of labor put in by Mr. Maldonado, a barrel-chested firefighter from the Bronx, has made even a bit of difference.
On detail at the World Trade Center site, he is helping fight no ordinary blaze. His assignment is to somehow put out what firefighting experts are calling the longest commercial building fire in United States history.
As in a stubborn coal mine fire, the combustion taking place deep below the surface is in many places not a fire at all. Instead, oxygen is charring the surfaces of buried fuels in a slow burn more akin to what is seen in the glowing coals of a raked-over campfire. But the scale of the trade center burning is vast, with thousands of plastic computers, acres of flammable carpet, tons of office furniture and steel and reservoirs of hydraulic oil and other fuels piled upon one another.
Steel beams pulled from the debris at times are so hot they are cherry red. Benzene, propylene, styrene and other chemicals generated by the combustion of computers, office products and fuels drift through the air. And at times, plumes of this smoke are still carried across Lower Manhattan, into City Hall, down to Wall Street, and up through TriBeCa, a relentless reminder of that morning on Sept. 11.
"You keep hitting it again and again with water," Mr. Maldonado said, his respirator momentarily pulled from his face, as he stood in the scorched landscape that once was the World Trade Center plaza. "But the fire won't give up. It is just a constant fight."
Progress has been made, to be sure.
Thermal aerial photographs and videotape shot in the days just after the attack show a nearly constant field of heat across large swaths of the 16-acre site. An aerial video shot late last week showed an underground blaze now confined largely to where the two towers once stood.
Deputy Fire Chief Charles R. Blaich said that even though almost no smoke could be seen coming up from the north tower site, the video showed that the smoldering still continued underground, as it did at the south tower, where smoke and steam was obvious.
"We are headed in the right direction," Chief Blaich said, as he watched the video at the World Trade Center incident command center on Duane Street. "But there still seems to be a significant amount of work to accomplish."
The trade center fire suppression effort is a decidedly low-tech affair.
A variety of creative approaches have been considered, including drilling holes deep into the debris piles so that foam could be pumped directly onto the fire, or somehow injecting nitrogen into the piles to try to extinguish the fire by forcing out the oxygen.
But with the exception of a week in early October, when 3,000 gallons of a special chemical were added to the water being pumped onto the site, it has largely been just firefighters with hoses and city water.
Nearly 110 firefighters and rescue workers are at the scene at all times, but most of them act as spotters, watching as the demolition effort continues and trying to find human remains. The actual fire suppression team has 10 firefighters and officers on each 12-hour shift who are given two basic assignments: some work with hand lines; and others, like Mr. Maldonado, 35, are lifted in ladder trucks, and then use high pressure hoses to shoot the water down.
"It is tedious work, hour after hour operating a line," said Tom Ferreri, 32, a fireighter from Brooklyn who has worn his respirator so much that a scar has formed at the top of his nose. "It is not like any other fire I have ever faced."
But there is no lack of determination and few complaints from the firefighters, who consider it an honor to be at ground zero, laboring to put out a fire at a site where 343 firefighters and more than 2,500 others died.
"Unfortunately, we aren't here saving people or getting people out of a fire," Mr. Ferreri said. "But we are here to get our brothers out, trying to bring closure for families."
Each day's firefighting targets are largely dictated by how the demolition work is going. Dozens of giant backhoes, grapplers and other earth- moving equipment move constantly across the site, resembling a pack of dinosaurs voraciously feeding in some primordial swamp. As they grab at the debris, they open up air vents that feed the underground fire.
Most of the time, the hoses are trained on spots where the firefighters can see smoke, which changes from white to gray, and sometimes to black, depending on how close and intense the underground blaze is. Greenish-yellow smoke rises from where the ironworkers cut apart steel beams. And at times, without any notice, bright flames erupt and suddenly surround the earth-moving equipment as workers shift debris and oxygen flows to meet combustible materials.
These are the toughest moments for the firefighters. The giant mounds of debris in some spots and the deep pits elsewhere prevent firefighters from quickly repositioning their ladder trucks and hoses. So a special all-terrain vehicle designed to fight brush fires is quickly dispatched, carrying its own small supply of water to douse the flames.
The chiefs in charge often stand on the rooftop of a small fire station on Liberty Street, just at the edge of ground zero, a station that miraculously was not damaged as the towers collapsed. With binoculars, they survey the scene, calling out orders to the suppression teams below.
"We need to make sure we keep that ladder truck right there," one of the fire chiefs squawked into his radio Thursday morning, as he realized that all his other suppression firefighters had been temporarily moved off the site as demolition crews prepared to tear down a section of what remained of the north tower. "Keep him right there."
It is no mystery why the fire has burned for so long. Mangled steel and concrete, plastics from office furniture and equipment, fuels from elevator hydraulics, cars and other sources are all in great supply in the six-story basement area where the two towers collapsed.
Water alone rarely can quench this kind of fire, which will burn as long as there is adequate fuel and oxygen and as long as heat cannot escape, fire experts said.
The longest-burning fire on earth, in southeastern Australia, is thought to have been started by a lightning strike 2,000 years ago and is slowly eating away at a buried coal deposit. In Centralia, Pa., a fire that began in a landfill in 1962 spread to old coal mines and has been burning ever since.
"When you have a huge mass of materials deeply buried like this, it's sort of analogous to the Centralia mine fire," said Dr. Thomas J. Ohlemiller, a chemical engineer and fire expert at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. "Very little heat is lost, so the reaction can keep going at relatively low temperatures, provided you have a weak supply of oxygen coming through the debris."
In September, several government and private experts offered various proposals to help curb the fire, including the use of foams commonly employed to fight underground fires in oil fields and of hand-held heat- sensing instruments to track hot spots. But the city turned down almost all the suggestions.
"It's frustrating to find yourself sitting on the sidelines when you know what to do," said a federal official.
City fire officials defended their approach, saying they rejected several proposals after deeming them either too dangerous or possibly ineffective.
One idea that was accepted came from a company in Lynchburg, Va., that sold the city about 3,000 gallons of its product Pyrocool, which, when mixed with water, is intended to absorb heat from a fire until the temperature drops below the point of combustion. A total of 750,000 gallons of the diluted Pyrocool was spread over ground zero in late September and early October, at a cost of about $120,000.
Pyrocool's operations director, Eddie Tyler, said the substance had been used to quickly douse thousands of fires worldwide over the past eight years.
When round-the-clock Pyrocool treatment at the trade center was stopped after a week, Chief Blaich said, there was noticeable progress. But the fires were still burning, in large part because of difficulty in getting the substance down through the debris pile and directly onto hot spots.
In a hot flaming fire, many toxic chemicals are incinerated, with little given off except carbon soot, carbon dioxide, water vapor and other fairly innocuous emissions.
But the relatively low temperatures of the trade center fires mean that traces of dozens of toxic chemicals and heavy metals are carried into the air, including benzene, a cancer-causing compound released when fuels are burned, and styrene, a gas emitted by burning plastic. At times the chemicals in the air at the site reach dangerous levels, particularly when fire flares up, as it did on Nov. 8.
Firefighters and others who work atop the debris pile are supposed to wear respirators at all times, but not everyone does.
Health and environmental officials have repeatedly said that the emissions pose no significant health hazard outside the wreckage zone; and air samples taken even a few yards from the heart of the wreckage usually fail to detect chemicals at dangerous levels.
But aside from any health threat, the emissions have caused persistent sore throats, stinging eyes and frayed nerves in many workers and residents in Lower Manhattan.
No one knows just how long it will take to put out the fires; predictions range from two more weeks to several months. Deputy Assistant Chief Peter E. Hayden, the trade center incident commander, is among the more optimistic.
During a tour of the underground area near hot spots, officials found that the fire did not extend below the third basement level, he said.
Demolition crews are getting close to this point, and when they reach it, Mr. Hayden said, firefighters should be able to extinguish the remaining fire.
Firefighters at the site say they try to stay focused on their work, drawing inspiration from memories of their colleagues who died on Sept. 11.
"I just see their faces," Mr. Maldonado said. "But it is hard. It is nothing but destruction down here."
Those who live and work near the site say that while they appreciate the effort to fight the fires, they are eager for the day when the air will finally be cleared of smoke.
"It really is sickening, depressing," said Jonathan Rapport, a lawyer who works on the 38th floor of the Woolworth Building, overlooking the site. "A good day is when the wind is blowing out to the river so I don't have to smell it."
Scott
