Get the latest tech news
A skyscraper that could have toppled over in the wind (1995)
What’s an engineer’s worst nightmare? To realize that the supports he designed for an office tower are flawed—and hurricane season is approaching.
“Oh, my God,” he thought, “now we’ve got that on top of an error from the bolts being underdesigned.” Refining their data further, the Canadians teased out wind-tunnel forces for each structural member in the building, with and without the tuned mass damper in operation; it remained for LeMessurier to interpret the numbers’ meaning. As a result, press coverage in New York City the next day was as uninformative as the handout: a short piece in the Wall Street Journal, which raised no questions about the nature of the new data, and one in the News, which dutifully quoted DeFord’s remark about belts and suspenders. Instead, he brought in drywall crews and carpenters to work from 5 p. m. to 8 p. m., putting up plywood enclosures around the chevrons and tearing down Sheetrock; welders to weld from 8 p. m. until 4 a. m., with the building’s fire-alarm system shut off; and then laborers to clean up the epic mess before the first secretaries arrived.
Or read this on Hacker News
