Remember that these columns were built strong enough so that together they could hold up a 110-story building, and they did that for a quarter of a century. Intuition tells me that that energy is many times the building's potential energy, the energy that was available in the fall.
Unless you are an experienced structural engineer you can safely dismiss your intuitions about such things. And if you are an engineer then you ought to be able to provide arguments to ground such intuitions.
By my calcs, the buildings lost less than 20% of their potential energy in the fall. That 20% would have had to shatter the columns, pulverize the concrete, and accelerate the air to gusts.
How do you get to this 20% figure? How did you calculate that? Whatever happened to the other 80%?
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