Reply #74: It totally collapsed...

[William Seger]

... up to an expansion joint, which in reinforced concrete buildings creates structurally separate and independent buildings to avoid cracks from thermal stresses. Yes, the initiating events were completely different from the WTC, but you said you understood Bazant's paper, which is concerned with what happened after that. What happened after that is completely similar to the section of Bazant's paper that I quoted in post #66: There was more kinetic energy in the falling mass than the structure could absorb.

It had nothing to do with the top of the structure remaining rigid, so that part of Bazant's model is simply not relevant, whether or not it's accurate. As I said before, he explained what and why he was doing, and you apparently haven't even read it. Your claiming that you have x-ray vision to see what's happening inside the debris cloud at the WTC collapse is not evidence of anything. What is evidence, however, is that we can see plenty of evidence of the Bazant model at work, including "crush down/crush up," in the videos of the vérinage type of demolition:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwFHEoiUZ7o

I don't have any hope of making you understand this, but that simply doesn't matter. I can assure that these kinds of arguments against Bazant's paper will repeatedly fail, because you simply don't know what you are talking about.