Luxury skyscraper hotel completely engulfed by fire in Grozny, Chechnya (VIDEO, PHOTOS)

[AtheistCrusader]

239. The inner core only holds up a certain percentage of the building's mass.

And it becomes irrelevant if the outer columns fail, because the floor trusses then fail, and everything comes down, leaving the core columns with no lateral support. There's quite a lot 'going on' in there, during the collapse. Very chaotic lateral forces. I suppose it was within the realm of possibility that those central columns might have stayed standing below say, the midpoint of the building, but that didn't happen, and isn't surprising.

The building is a tube within a tube. The floors are 'hung' between these tube walls. Take one away, and it's all over bar the shouting. NIST, Purdue, MIT, all cited the sagging floors pulling inward on the outer columns as the initiator of the collapse. Break the outer wall high enough on the building, and it's all coming down. Keep in mind, each floor is an acre in area.

Keep in mind, the south tower had the mass equivalent of the Japanese WWII battleship Yamato sitting above the fire/impact point. That's a lot of mass to 'drop' when the outer supports failed.

The outcome seems inevitable to me.