NIST on the Freefall of WTC7: Wrong Answer

Severe Neglegence by the nations premiere engineering group...or something else.
I dunno, Im quite familiar with the engineering trade myself and this QA session just screams "BLAH BLAH BLAH, AVOID THE QUESTIONS WITH TRASH".

MINK

says...

bad wording of the question.

schmawy

says...

The question posed was...

"Any number of competent measurements using a variety of methods indicate the northwest corner of WTC 7 fell with an acceleration within a few percent of the acceleration of gravity. Yet your report contradicts this, claiming 40% slower than freefall based on a single data point. How can such a public, visible, easily measurable quantity be set aside?"

Perhaps poorly worded, but the answer was...

"Could you repeat the question?"

[the question is repeated by the moderator, leaving out the word, "competent" as well as the last sentence]

"Well...um...the...first of all gravity...um...gravity is the loading function that applies to the structure...um...at...um...applies....to every body...every...uh...on...all bodies on...ah...on...um... this particular...on this planet not just...um...uh...in ground zero...um...the...uh...the analysis shows a difference in time between a free fall time, a free fall time would be an object that has no...uh... structural components below it. And if you look at the analysis of the video it shows that the time it takes for the...17...uh...for the roof line of the video to collapse down the 17 floors that you can actually see in the video below which you can't see anything in the video is about...uh... 3.9 seconds. What the analysis shows...and...uh...the structural analysis shows, the collapse analysis shows that same time that it took for the structural model to come down from the roof line all the way for those 17 floors to disappear is...um... 5.4 seconds. It's...uh..., about one point...uh...five seconds or roughly 40% more time for that free fall to happen. And that is not at all unusual because there was structural resistance that was provided in this particular case. And you had...you had a sequence of structural failures that had to take place and everything was not instantaneous."