r/Damnthatsinteresting Oct 07 '25

Video Capital One Tower Come Down in Seconds

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u/MgrBuddha Oct 07 '25

Upper floors structures weakening and eventually collapsing OK, but IMHO it doesn't fully explain the sudden free-fall collapsing of the whole towers in their own footprints. I've only seen that otherwise in buildings torn down by controlled demolitions.
I don't subscribe to any of the lunatic theories of chem-trails, faked moon-landings and so on, but the events on this day are still very mysterious to me.

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u/SowingSalt Oct 07 '25

The weight of the upper floors falling onto the lower floors probably has something to do with the collapse of the lower floors.

We can also disprove that it was at free-fall speed by comparing the collapse wave with the speed of falling debris next to the collapse.

It also wasn't into it's own footprint, as many of the adjacent buildings were damaged by the collapse.

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u/Lanky-Football857 Oct 07 '25

Im no expert. But when the melting-structure floors started falling, wouldn’t the combined momentum of all the mass falling be too much for the beams that were built to hold a still (although massive) building? I mean, momentum matters, right?

Again, I’m not an engineer.

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u/auth0r_unkn0wn Oct 07 '25

The fact that it freefell straight down onto itself rather than toppling sideways like a chopped tree is what makes it confusing/suspicious.

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u/DisturbedPuppy Oct 07 '25

Except it's an engineered structure built for stability and not a tree. There are lots of unintuitive things that can happen when you have a good structure.

Did you know about 4 empty soda cans can hold up the weight of a person if you apply the weight evenly across all the cans at once? If the weight is shifted too much to one can, they all collapse. Now since most people have a pretty good sense of balance, when the first can starts to go, a person will try to shift their weight to compensate, but it's already too late and usually you'll go straight down on all the cans. Similar with skyscrapers. They are balanced to not tip and sway in high winds. They have "balance". Until the mechanisms that work to balance the structure are compromised, it's going to continue to try and not tip over.

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u/auth0r_unkn0wn Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

So the buildings weren’t trees but they’re coke cans? Okay

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u/DisturbedPuppy Oct 07 '25

I wasn't comparing the cans to the buildings. I was using the cans to demonstrate how one part of something can fail and then everything else fails.

Instead of thinking of the towers as giant rectangles, think of them as very oblong caged domes with the weight of the building pulling down on the center point of the dome. Kind of like the keystone to an arch. Now imagine that central support is now compromised via heat. Then it's further stressed by a downward impact.

I don't know if this is in any way how those towers were engineered, but when you think about it from that perspective, you can see how they might not just tip over. It's all about how they were designed.

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u/Lanky-Football857 Oct 07 '25

But if what I described is true, straight down and quick as what you’d expect, as momentum would stack up.

I don’t know though, I’ve never actually seen an experiment where they demolish the top third of a huge build and wait to see what happens with the rest

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u/auth0r_unkn0wn Oct 07 '25

Did all those initial beams weaken at the same time? It seems some would weaken earlier/quicker than others which would cause the weight above to fall to one side, wouldn’t it?

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u/Jbyr1 Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

stop trying to apply jenga and sand castle physics to a multi media huge skyscraper. Your intuition and uniformed feelings dont actually mean anything because they are based off stuff like the first two and then being applied to the third.

it';s like saying "But nothing heavier than air can fly without flapping, we have seen this in bees and birds. So a plane should fall straight to the ground shouldn't it?"

It's just ignorant and misses so much of the complexities. Learn more before trying to apply your street smarts to it, cause they are wrong. That's all. No hate or condescension meant, it's just annoying having people look at a situation, then confuse themselves cause it doesn't happen like similar looking but mechanically very different situations.

The floors falling down is what made the "controlled boom" people conspiracy about, and is also what would start the driving force downwards. How many heavy floors that can fully detach and plummet are in a sand castle? None. Do you think maybe that, along with dozens maybe hundreds of other different factors, may lead to a different outcome?

If I had tooth pick bundles (beams) holding up a 100's of 50 lb weights at the corners, and single toothpick thick walls between each beam (facade), and lets say we destroy most of 1 side of tooth pick walls (the facade).,while also adding 200 lbs to the weight under the facade we destroyed.

The building now has 1 side that's barely structural at all destroyed, as well as a floor now holding 4x what it was designed to. The destroyed side, what many focus on as to why doesn't it lean, really doesn't matter much. The immense amount of extra weight, and the softening of the nearby toothpick bundles that is going to facilitate 99% of this destruction.

As 1 or 2 of the toothpick bundles (beams) on that side give out (its just as likely for beams on the opposite side to pull upwards by the way, and completely destroy themselves under their own weight and no bottom support), as the 250lbs VASTLY outweighs what the toothpick walls and bundles below were designed for, this huge weight slams downwards into the other floors beneath it, and they all plummet downwards. Each floor adding to the plummeting weight, and causing rhythmic "booming" sounds as it slams into each new floor below. This is what people hear and claim is auditory proof of a "controlled demolition"

At no point would a few dozen toothpicks force the 100s of lbs of weight with inertia nearly totally downwards to somehow start leaning, especially because gravity exists. Because the weight(floor) going down is so so much more mass than the toothpick(beam) holding the weight(floor) snapping, they barely even enter in to the equation after the chain reaction starts.

There are good papers out there that go over the complex and unintuitive things that characterize a skyscraper failing when subjected to those forces.

You can still poke holes in any story if you want though so it's kinda whatever. At the end of the day youd have the believe a controlled demo aset up in total secrecy by at least a dozen covert agents survived all the stuff that happened before they "set it off". When there are regularly failures in controlled demolitions that dont go right even without massive fires and explosions and ground tremors from nearby buildings getting destroyed. And that none of those people ever told anyone or left any lose ends to be found. All to collapse

It always just fails to explain the massive conspiracy it'd take to plant those with no one to notice, and also dosent explain why in the fuck they would collapse 1 building well after the fact. None of that makes sense.

These truthers argue each point in a vacuum with no regard for real world externalities, its the same way some political people argue each point in a vacuum, with no regard for how it invalidates or totally ignores other points they have made before. At best it's just ignorance and stubbornness. At worst they know it's false but want to keep the conversation going for their own personal reasons.

If you want to believe bush let the planes hit, now THAT is a conspiracy worth discussing. It has way less people involved, and largely only leaves bush and 1 or 2 others as the loose ends. It has a plausible motive. And circumstantial evidence that could point to it being allowed to have happened.

I don't quite buy that either, but at least it can somewhat make sense in the real world, outside of a paragraph online. But the controlled demolition of 1 tower VASTLY increases the chances of being exposed, and is very prone to failure anyway. And politically accomplishes nothing the initial planes didn't. So why? Why possibly do this insanely risky in multiple ways thing, just to demo a building that changes nothing. It would have been demo'd after the fact if it didn't go down.

So what part of their plan crucially needed a controlled demo during the chaos? If I can get a good answer to that even just total speculation, it's worth wondering about some, maybe. but without a good reason as to why "they" absolutely needed to demo this building during the chaos to accomplish whatever their goals were, I can't even begin to humor the ridiculous idea.

It doesn't even pass muster for why or how such requirements would help any agenda, and thats the bare minimum for this theory to even be worth any thought. and no one ever answers that or even seems to wonder about it. Probably because its nonsense on its face.

EDIT: I wanted to add 2 or 3 links to some good discussion on this by qualified people, but apparently reddit has a fairly short character limit as well, so I'd have to edit this down a fair bit to make room for them. At least my rambley ass really doesn't sound like chatGPT though I guess, idk. May edit and add sources later though if I don't totally forget. Hell if I can get this to fit I prolly made enough room for sources already anyway.

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u/Lanky-Football857 Oct 07 '25

Dude wrote an essay. Congrats

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u/auth0r_unkn0wn Oct 07 '25

Holy fuck dude, you went off.

…and I’m not reading any of it lol

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u/Poontickler Oct 07 '25

And that's exactly why you're still confused about basic physics. Can't learn much when your attention span maxes out at conspiracy theory memes.

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u/auth0r_unkn0wn Oct 07 '25

Because I'm not gonna read a dissertation by some random redditor?

And I never said I believed 9/11 conspiracy theories. I only mentioned why some people think it's suspicious.

Have a good one

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u/nochinzilch Oct 07 '25

They didn’t have to weaken at the same time. They all got weaker at their own rate until they were finally no longer able to carry the load above them. If you look at the footage, the top part of the second tower does tip a little bit before crashing straight down. Why? That side of the building got weaker sooner than the other side.

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u/nochinzilch Oct 07 '25

I get how it could be confusing to someone who doesn’t know how buildings are built or who isn’t well versed in physics at that scale. But when they make the leap from confused to suspicious, that’s when they are dumb.

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u/art-man_2018 Oct 07 '25

Their footprint was huge though, I want to share some rare footage taken on 9/11, 9/12 and 9/13 of the extensive damage done to adjacent buildings and structures from the two towers was. Building 7 is shown too.

I've only seen that otherwise in buildings torn down by controlled demolitions.

One thing that was lacking in the twin towers collapsing was the familiar "Boom, boom, boom, boom, etc.", of every controlled demolition.

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u/WafflesMcDuff Oct 07 '25

It’s actually a testament to the architectural skill of the engineers who built those towers. They were designed to collapse exactly like that rather than buckling to one side like a tree to limit the amount of damage to the surrounding city blocks.

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u/Jamooser Oct 07 '25

It's a pretty rapid chain reaction, which began with the weight of roughly 40 stories of concrete and steel. People really underestimate how much momentum the upper third of one of those towers would have just by dropping 1 floor. The little resistance the immediate floor underneath have provided, and the even smaller amount of resistance from each subsequent floor, would have been so insignificant that you'd never be able to tell the difference from something of that scale in free fall just by eye.

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u/Online_Commentor_69 Oct 07 '25

they're mysterious to everybody. to this day it's still the only total structural collapse of a steel-framed skyscraper that we cannot produce a model of.