Something had to melt that steel
Fires burned in the rubble for many days.
Fire surrounded by insulating masonry.
That is the same environment as a smelter.
Something had to melt that steel .... Detonations of great magnitude did it IMO
Detonations might bend it, or shatter it, but it wouldn't melt it. Only a lot of heat would melt it.
The top floor section that was toppling over to begin with should have fallen in one piece to the bottom
Photos show that it remained more or less in one piece until it hit the rest of the building (which was crumbling at a speed somewhat less than free-fall so the top section caught up with it).
If the floors had "pancaked" the structural steel would have remained stand
That doesn't make sense. Pancaking means that the upper floors were were hitting with enough force to break the floor below. They didn't just cleanly hit the inner floor and punch through, the pile of debris hit the whole floor, walls, center columns, and everything and broke it into debris to fall on the next floor. The structural steel of the world trade center was ONLY the outer walls. There was no inner skeleton to distribute the weight of the debris, and when floors were pushed down, the outer walls were pulled in. The result is that they all broke into fairly small pieces.
firemen are very normal people who say they saw flashes of detonations on the bottom floors just before the building collapsed.
Had the lower floors been destroyed, then the building would have pancaked in reverse. That is to say the first floor would have broken and the second floor along with the entire rest of the building would have moved down until the second floor hit the debris, where it would crush, and the entire building would move down another floor. etc etc. The collapse would be from the bottom up, not from the point of impact down.
I don't know what the fireman saw, perhaps big chunks of masonry falling 1000 feet sound like explosions when they hit the ground. As the building began to break it would likely shed some pieces before it entirely collapsed.
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