Spread out over some drop area that's still just a nuisance. Even falling on one area chances of loss of life are minimal, since due to the gradient of gravity accelerating the top end of the wire the least. It should experience way too much drag to have some sort of whip effect on the ground rather than entering a stable configuration before arrival. You'll see it more-or-less neatly arriving in the right order. The first few grams of material landing on your house is maybe a good warning to get out of the way before the remaining 20 tons are done arriving in a few days.
If you have some thin wire design you could also consider just spooling it up as it drops, either at the base or with portable infrastructure you'll have plenty of time to deploy. If you do that you're just dealing with grams of material/second that you can deal with piecewise. Do this faster than terminal velocity and it'll land exactly where you want it to.
That part is not exactly an engineering challenge if you consider what other other stuff humanity likes to get up to with kilometers of much heavier cables and chains.
So possible 100s to thousands of tons falling for 5+ days…