Fire Melts Steel - Somebody Call Rosie

Rosie O'Donnell on The View recently joined the Truther movement and declared the collapse of the World Trade Center to be some sort of government plot. Her rationale was that 9/11 was "the first time that fire has melted steel", and therefore it had to be a conspiracy. That's nonsense, of course, but to the Truthers it makes perfect sense.

Well, if 9/11 was the first time, this weekend marked the second:

A gasoline tanker crashed and burst into flames near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Sunday, creating such intense heat that a stretch of highway melted and collapsed. Officials predicted a traffic nightmare for Bay Area commuters for weeks or months to come.

Flames shot 200 feet in the air, but the truck's driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns. No other injuries were reported in the 3:45 a.m. crash, which officials said could have been deadly had it occurred at a busier time.

"I've never seen anything like it," Officer Trent Cross of the California Highway Patrol said of the crumpled interchange. "I'm looking at this thinking, 'Wow, no one died' - that's amazing. It's just very fortunate."

Authorities said the damage could take months to repair, and that it would cause the worst disruption for Bay Area commuters since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged a section of the Bay Bridge itself.

Hmmm. A fuel fed fire gets hot enough to weaken and collapse structural steel. Imagine that.