It would take many, many months to prep building 7 for demolition.    It was 200 feet taller than the next tallest building every demolished. It was enormous with each floor almost a football field in size.  1.8 million square feet in total.  When the Hudson department store was demolished (430 feet high as compared to like 617 for WTC 7)  it took three months to examine the building and plan the demolition, two months to prep the building.  You need to not just wire the building, but precut the steel to weaken the building and a month to load the explosives, that's when you wire it.   And that was on an empty structure.  There's basically no way to prep an occupied office building for demolition without people noticing, because you need to rip out the offices to get to the steel.  It's loud, dirty and smelly work.....oxyfuel torches used to cut steel give off fumes When Silverstein was talking about pulling it he was not talking demolition.  In fact, "pulling" in demolition terms is about using cables and hydraulics to pull a building down......i.e. not imploding the building, not explosives used.  This was the method that the remains of WTC 7 were demolished in December 2001.  What Silverstein is talking about is "pulling" the fire fighting effort.   The FDNY had noticed that a few hours before it felt the buildings structural integrity had been compromised. The used a surveyor's tool called a transit and noticed the corner of the building on floors 10-13 was not longer at 90 angles, but was bulging outwards....very bad news for a building at around 2PM they stopped the fire fighting efforts and set up a perimeter around the building because they were pretty sure it was in danger of collapsing.  This was the FDNY's decision not Silversteins. People who want to full you into thinking it was demolished often don't show the full video of it coming down.  The OP uses the short version of the collapse.  The longer video shows that the left side of the roof collapses well before the full building.  Clearly it was an ongoing progressive failure. https://i.gifer.com/DLoy.gif This indicates a partial collapse started on the left side and progressed through the building.  The penthouse of the roof goes down at least 4-5 seconds before building goes. An remember we can see floors 10-13 in this picture.  The initial point of collapse is believed to happen on between floors 6-13 first.  Those floors are blocked by surrounding buildings.  The collapse definitely went up to the roof and probably from left to right at the same time.  WTC 7 was a built as a "box within a box."  The two parts had lateral support added to their strength.  The inner box is pretty much collapsed by the we see the outer shell go down.  It goes right down because by this time the lower floors are gone. Imagine a 47 layer Jenga Tower.  Now imagine your looking at the top half of the tower. And layers 8-12 are falling down, what's happens to the top?  It comes straight down until it hits something.    The column that is the suspected failure point was not only the column spaced further away from any other columns (the WTC loved wide, wide open offices.) but was also located directly under the penthouse on the roof that failed first.