Reply #155: We were talking about the entire top of the building

[petgoat]

Bazant's assumption that the entire top of the building fell 12 feet, imposing
dynamic loads, is absurd.

Your pancaking concrete floors have nothing to do with that. It's irrelevant
to the collapse of the towers because obviously at Skyline the entire floor fell
as a unit. There is no way from asymmetrical structural damage and asymmetrical
fires to get entire floors at the WTC falling as a unit.

My "birdsnest on a fencepole" model is an accurate picture of the effect of a
disorganized mass of debris on the robust and extensively cross-braced core.

I do not claim to understand how structures respond to disaster better than
structural engineers do. Note that the government engineers never explained
how the buildings collapsed. They created a computer model that generated
some sort of collapse, and then they assumed that since the building underwent
total progressive collapse, that an asymmetrical, localized, partial collapse
somehow brought the entire building down.