ROSIE O'DONNELL, CALL THE CONSPIRACY OFFICE
I wonder if Rosie O'Donnell, that noted metallurgist and expert in thermodynamics, will offer a conspiratorial explanation of the collapse of a highway overpass near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Otherwise, she would have to eat her words about the collapse of the World Trade Center Building 7, which she claims was brought down not by fire but by explosives, perhaps in an attempt to cover up the Enron scandal.

Rosie's interesting hypothesis about WTC #7, made March 15 on her blog and on "The View,"a daytime talk show from which she is being unceremoniously dumped, is that "for the first time in history, fire melted steel" on 9/11. This came as a great surprise to recyclers who melt steel all the time, and shipbuilders and others who bend steel every day. Rosie the Riveter could have told her how easy it is soften steel with heat.

Rosie O'Donnell has retreated a little, stating on her blog merely that the destruction of the World Trade Center was the first time steel buildings had been destroyed by fire.

The vulnerability of steel-framed structures to intense heat, however, was demonstrated again Monday in Oakland when a gasoline tanker truck rammed into a guardrail and caught fire.

According to news reports: "Heat from the flames exceeded 2,750 degrees and caused the steel beams holding up the overpass to buckle and bolts holding the structure together to melt, California Department of Transportation director Will Kempton said."

It is quite true that most high-rise fires do not result in collapse of the structure. There are very few fires in high-rises in the first place since they are designed to be fireproof and are made of inflammable material (steel and concrete). But if you smash thousands of pounds of aviation fuel into a highrise and set it on fire, you will indeed have an inferno that will warp the steel and cause the building to collapse in pancake fashion as the north and south towers did. It was not the fact of the airplanes hitting the buildings that caused the collapse, as Rosie seems to think, but the intense fire touched off by the aviation fuel.

Building 7 might well have survived the disaster that consumed its neighbors but for the fact that it was equipped with generators served by high-pressure fuel lines, which, experts believe, pumped fuel into a fire started by burning debris. Building 7's steel skeleton lost integrity and collapsed after nine hours of such punishment.

But all that makes too much sense for Rosie, who prefers to believe that somebody took advantage of the chaos to blow up Building 7 to derail the investigation of Enron. Or something. One wonders what mysterious forces she will find that benefit from the collapse of a highway in Oakland.