Creative Speculation

... nor would there be even if you blew out some of the columns. That's because the collapse was actually a series of impacts followed by structural failures, followed by the continued gravitational acceleration of the debris down to the next impact. One way to look at it is that the reason the collapse rate was "near freefall" was because mostly the debris WAS in freefall between collisions, after a very a brief descent through the resistance provided by the failing members. Those impacts are the source of the dynamic loading that Chandler's analysis ignores and that Szamboti's analysis overestimates. As I said, what Chandler and Szamboti actually measure is just the AVERAGE of all those individual failure events, and there is no reason to expect a single large "jolt" from them.