Tour the world and watch it fall down

Doug.Palmer at csiro.au Doug.Palmer at csiro.au
Thu Oct 31 15:58:01 EST 2002


> Like the leaning tower of Pisa.  Or a bridge that vibrates so 
> hard you can't
> see the car ahead of you beacuse of the wave of bitumen.  Wooo.

One of the ones I've always liked wasn't a disaster, but was a great example
of things going wrong for subtle reasons.

The Citicorp Centre in New York was built on condition that St Peter's
Lutheran Church fitted underneath it. To do that, they had to put the
support columns on the centres of the walls, rather than at the corners.
This was all (theoretically) tested against wind shear and approved and the
building went up.

Later on, the structural engineer, William LeMessurier, was told that some
lecturer was saying that the building couldn't withstand the wind shear. He
said "rubbish" and redid the calculations. After that, he redid the
calculations for wind shear on the diagonal and -- whoops -- it turned out
that the unusual positioning of the columns created extra stress on the
joints of the building. No problem since the joints should withstand the
extra stress. Except that, for practical reasons, the specified welds had
been replaced by bolts.

Oh, and hurrican season was approaching.

He convinced the Citicorp centre to do something about it. Without telling
anyone, an army of welders appeared every night, pulled off the rockcrete
cladding. Welded plates over the bolts and put everything back for the next
day. Someone was posted at the top of the building with a radio during that
time, looking for hurricanes.

It was called Project SERENE. Special Engineering Review of Events Nobody
Envisioned

(I reckon LeMessurier counts as an engineer taking responsibility for a
potential disaster. He did consider suicide before contacting Citicorp.)

http://onlineethics.org/moral/LeMessurier/lem.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/citicorp.html
There was also a really good New Yorker article about it in 199[56].



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