Free Fallin' Again

I don't know why this idea didn't occur to me before this, but this afternoon I thought I'd try timing one of the controlled demolitions that the "Truthers" are so fond of citing as comparables for the World Trade Center Buildings. Professor Jones recommends the Southwark Towers as particularly instructive in his paper, Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse.

Here's a page with the Southwark Towers demolition. You have to click on the third icon from the left on the bottom row to see this demo.

Watching carefully, I estimated that the roof on the left building started sagging right around 38.24 into the movie, and that the top of the building hit ground at about 45.69. Thus the duration of the collapse was about 7.45 seconds. From this page we know that the roof of the building was about 98 meters high, or approximately 323 feet. But a building of 323 feet should not take 7.45 seconds to collapse in free fall, it should only take 4.5 seconds by the formula 16*4.5^2=323.

We can also figure out the actual formula for the drop of the building observed; it's about 5.85*7.45^2, which is quite a bit slower than free fall.

Now let's try using that formula to determine how long it should have taken the World Trade Center towers to fall.

1360=5.85*t^2
1360/5.85=t^2
232.5=t^2
t=15.25 seconds

Therefore, it appears that the World Trade Center came down too fast to be a controlled demolition.