Jet fuel and the steel beams

As told, the claim runs: kerosene burns at roughly 800-1,000C in open air, structural steel melts at about 1,510C, therefore fire could not have destroyed the frame, therefore something else brought the buildings down. The phrase became shorthand for the whole subject.

The comparison circulated on message boards within weeks of the attacks and was fixed in popular culture by the 2005 film Loose Change and later by a widely repeated internet meme. It gained force because the underlying temperature figures are broadly correct.

Accounts are deliberately not collected here. This entry documents a historical case rather than a circulating remedy.

The temperatures are right; the inference is not. Steel does not need to melt to fail — it loses roughly half its strength by 600C and continues weakening above that, and the towers were carrying enormous live load. Investigators found that the impacts stripped fireproofing from the floor trusses, the fires then sagged the floors, the sagging floors pulled inward on the perimeter columns, and once a storey failed the mass above it could not be arrested. Melting was never part of the proposed mechanism, so disproving melting disproves nothing.