That's very cool. I wonder, though, would the fires have gotten hot enough to melt the medals? Wouldn't they still be there in the rubble? Of course, there would be the trouble of finding them in the ashes and debris, if someone was allowed to even go into there.
Oh yeah, that fire is burning very hot when the wind blows on it, those metals are gold, silver, and bronze. It would easily burn away those metals, even steel would burn at those high wind blasted fire temperatures.
Those metals would burn as well as melt. The kindling temperature of steel is 1,600 degrees F. If steel is heated that hot it's ready for a chemical reaction, add oxygen with some force and it will burn readily. It burns, forms smoke and ash. We call burning metal plasma.
During a plasma event the temperatures become so hot it can fire clay soils such that the top layer of soil becomes pottery. If you were to drive through Mariposa on the north end of town you could see some of that fired clay soil which was caused by an extremely hot fire on the last 4th of July.
A well kept building trades secret is that steel is flammable if it is heated to above 1,600 degrees and an air blast or pure oxygen is added. That's why steel in buildings is often coated with a thick layer of fire stop. The fire stop slows the heating process such that a wood fire can burn, and burn out and cool down before it heats the steel too hot.
Plasma event fire is wicked, two good side by side examples are the twin towers collapse in New York, that was a twin plasma event. First the buildings burned for hours and the internal temperature slowly overcame the one-hour fire stop coatings, and one-hour fire doors failed. At a certain point a several story section of the buildings reached the kindling point for steel, and the air blast effect of a tall building on fire without enough fire doors being left intact to stop that air movement created plasma which almost instantaneously spread. It removed the steel frame from within the building in seconds, and in seconds the the entire buildings collapsed into a pool of molten steel in the basement. The molten metal from the steel frame of the building arrived in the basement first, quickly followed by everything else those buildings had been.