The towers were specifically built to collapse straight down in case of catastrophe so that they wouldn’t fall over and destroy surrounding buildings.
They acted just as they were supposed to.
I have often thought about how lucky we were that "only" 3,000 people died. As you point out, if either of the towers had tumbled over, like a fallen tree, the death toll would have been exponentially worse considering the population density in the area immediately surrounding ground zero.
Also, I think it's fortunate that the planes actually hit as high as they did on the buildings, presumably giving many more people the opportunity to escape. And all that says nothing of the fact that one of the planes crashed into an empty field, rather than some DC landmark, including the Capitol building. 3,000 people died, but with just a few twists of fate, it could have been so much worse.
The towers were specifically built to collapse straight down in case of catastrophe so that they wouldn’t fall over and destroy surrounding buildings. They acted just as they were supposed to.
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This is absolutely correct, although with some clarification. I asked my architect friend Karl C about this, and he spent most of his time spitting nails about how the 9/11 Truthers are evil and I should have nothing to do with them.
But when I got him to focus, he expalined that ALL modern office buildings are designed with “LOAD-SHIFTING’ features that distribute the load around the buiding horizontally.
THe purpose however is to resist collapse and to hope that either the occupants will have more time to escape or the buiding might not fall. But a side effet of this design is that WHEN the building collapses, the weight is focused down the centerline.
Example: When one side of the buiding was damaged, the twin towers did not collapse. EVERYONE was able to evacuate the twin towers except those trapped above the fires and the firefighters trying to help them.
The “load shifting” design bought the 50,000 people who worked there the time to escape.
The damaged side of the building is held up by the undamaged sides (they were damaged by fire, but I mean initially). The load is shifted horizontally around the building. That is how the damaged side was able to stand up from 9:03 to 9:58 AM in one tower and 8:45 to 10:28 AM in the other tower.
Traditionally, an older design for a building would have simply collapsed on the damaged side immediately, and the rest of the building would have followed.
The goal is the hope that the building will stay up. But a consequence of this load-shifting is that WHEN the building is overwhelmed, the building fails EVERYWHERE across the horizontal cross-section. If not, it would still stay up. It resits as long as it can.
So the design of EVERY floor, each floor considered independenty, focuses the collapse down the centerline like a lens or a funnel. Each floor is TRYING to resist the collapse by shifting the load and bearing up the load across the horizontal cross-section.
So, as my architect friend sputtered in frustration, the collapse that we saw on 9/11 is INEVITABLE and unavoidable.
Furthermore, it is a MYTH that the collapses were as neat as claimed.
The fact is that 95% of the debris fell outside the footprint. The collapse was actually very messy. The building did fall down the centerline. But it was incredibly sloppy and nothing at all like any controlled demolition.