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In reply to the discussion: 9/11 Link To Saudi Arabia Is Topic Of 28 Redacted Pages In Government Report; Congressmen Push For R [View all]AZCat
(8,347 posts)While some of the debris from the buildings fell away from the base, the bulk of the material went pretty much straight down. This isn't any different from other collisions. The towers had a large amount of potential energy and some of that was translated into lateral kinetic energy because of nonaxial collisions. 200 yards isn't that far when you consider how big the buildings were. You can even do a basic energy calculation to figure out what impulse energy needed to be applied to the various objects to get them to travel that far, and it's not significant compared to the overall energy budget.
It's important to note that not all metal is steel, and the melting points of several metals (lead, for example) that would have been found in the World Trade Center are much lower than steel. Unfortunately nobody seems to have any information on which metals were found melted, or where, or in what quantities.