Let's talk about the almost-disaster of The Citigroup Center - 601 Lexington Ave in NYC. This building was built on a lot that wasn't empty when they got there, and they made an objectively weird deal with a church on the corner: they would build their building over the church's footprint. This caused the building to be built on stilts - everything SEEMED ok until some people did some math & the right people were finally alerted. A huge (secret) retrofit was undertaken before the building destroyed the neighborhood. Taylor continues to not be able to believe she worked on the 38th floor of a NYC building for years.
Let's talk about the almost-disaster of The Citigroup Center - 601 Lexington Ave in NYC. This building was built on a lot that wasn't empty when they got there, and they made an objectively weird deal with a church on the corner: they would build their building over the church's footprint.
This caused the building to be built on stilts - everything SEEMED ok until some people did some math & the right people were finally alerted. A huge (secret) retrofit was undertaken before the building destroyed the neighborhood.
Taylor continues to not be able to believe she worked on the 38th floor of a NYC building for years.
Taylor: I put endometrial gel on it and it stopped bleeding
>> Taylor: In the matter of the people of State of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097.
>> Farz: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your. Taylor, we are back. And ask you how you're doing, but I think you're still bleeding.
>> Taylor: Okay. I put endometrial gel on it and it stopped bleeding. I feel like. I feel like that's like, disinfecting it and then, like, all is well.
>> Farz: Yeah. Worst case scenario, you can put super glue on a wound and that will close it.
>> Taylor: Oh, that's good. I actually couldn't find the super glue earlier, but that's good to know. No, I have this, like, tool that like, shaves off the edge of a 3D print and I cut myself with it. But all is well. I cleaned print and there's no blood on that.
>> Farz: Yeah. What do. What else do we have to catch up on? What is the banter that the people want to see today?
>> Taylor: I don't know. I feel like. I don't know. I'm just coming out of the sickness. My daughter did so much stuff this week. She did the talent show and she did an orchestra concert. She did. She was in like six acts in the talent show. She did all these tick tock dances. I was like, I can't believe, you know, those TikTok dances. It was just like, really fun and cute. And yesterday she did this, like, orchestra concert and she can play so many songs, and when she's home, she plays one song over and over again and she's like, whatever. But she's like, just great at it. So that was really fun.
What are schools doing on AI exposure for young children
>> Farz: Great question for you, because you have a child, you have young children. What are they? What is like, what are schools doing on AI exposure? Like, are they like, are your kids, like, starting out, like, AI proficient? Like, what does it look like?
>> Taylor: I don't really know because, well, they're on the computer for a bunch of stuff. Like they have, like, a laptop at school. They use. And they, like, use that. And like, so we give them, like, they. I think that they, like, do have access to, like, a school chatgpt to like, ask it questions and to, like, start doing stuff. But I definitely am, like, thinking of it in the way that, like, people were afraid of Wikipedia in the beginning and, like, you can't use Wikipedia for school, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, when I'm like, right now, I use it all the time, but I use it and then like, if I like, really want to go like deeper. I'll look at the sources and like go a little bit further with that, you know, so I'm like. I'm a little bit like, if you want to use it. Like, the way that I use it for this show is like, I use it to start and then I look at all the sources, you know, So I try to like make them do that and want to like, you know, read entire books, not just like Google them. I don't know. But yeah, I don't know.
>> Farz: Mostly just curious, like, what does life even look like when you're a child coming up in the age of AI? It's like.
>> Taylor: Yeah, I mean, like right now they still do a lot of like writing with their hands at school. Like, they write like a report at school and they don't type it. They like, are able to still like write it and stuff, which is great because that's like the most like that. Then at least obviously they're not like, just like copying and pasting from. From something. But when I paste, when I like get like a, like I asked chat gbt, I'll ask it like, you know, to give me like some sources and a thing and I'll paste that into Google Docs and then I'll like use that as, like expand it as I'm reading. But as soon as I paste it, Google Docs says this is written by AI. Does that. Does that.
>> Farz: Wait, does it really?
>> Taylor: Yeah, as soon as I do that, it like, it like I get like a big black pop up next to the thing that says this sentence looks like it was written by AI and like, it'll tell me all those things. I'm like, it was like, that's what I. And then I pull it apart and add a lot more to it and, you know, read all the sources and do all the things. But when I start it, it does tell me that it is. So.
>> Farz: Yeah, I didn't know it did that. That's incredible.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know the answer. We'll see. I mean, I just don't. I just don't have any idea what school is going to look like in a year, you know, or. Or five. Florence is in ending fifth grade this week, so she still has a lot. A long way to go before the end of high school. And there's. I mean, the world's gonna be so different. I don't know.
>> Farz: I have a theory that. Well, it's very centered around my own life experiences, which is probably why I'm thinking about the way I'm thinking about it, but I'm like, what is the point? What is going to be the point of law schools in like, 10 years? Yeah, like, what do you. What, like, what do you need? What do you need a lawyer for? Like, all the case law in the world is accessible and somebody like AI can be prompted to write a brief and do patent searches and why do you even need to go to school for that? It's kind of crazy.
>> Taylor: Totally. I. I don't. I don't know. My nail lady was like, I'm worried that we're gonna run out of doctors. And I was like, that's fair, because you're right. I don't, you know, I don't know. Like, I don't know anyone who's like, going to medical school and. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have an answer.
>> Farz: Do you know what'll never be replaced? Podcasters.
>> Taylor: Yeah, I'm gonna say podcasters who are literally being replaced by AI,
>> Farz: but those AI bots can't generate the rich content banter that you and I can.
>> Taylor: No, they can't. They can't be this. This friendship. You can't create this in a lab.
>> Farz: I can't tell an AI to make sure that it talks to the other AI like they're friends for 20 years. We'll get through it. We'll power through whatever.
>> Taylor: I'll introduce us.
>> Farz: Yeah, please.
Doomed to Fail brings you historical disasters and failures
>> Taylor: Welcome to Doomed to Fail. We bring you historical disasters and failures and I am real person Taylor, joined by real person fars.
>> Farz: We are real legit people, like, not fake even a little bit. So I'm be covering an engineering failure today, but one that succeeded and nobody suffered as a result of it. So it's actually a happy story.
>> Taylor: That's good.
>> Farz: Yeah. I'll be covering a New York skyscraper that was on the brink of collapse and the COVID mission that was undertook to save it without anybody really knowing.
>> Taylor: I'm scared. I'm like, nervous. Go ahead.
>> Farz: You might actually know this building. It's because it's very distinct, it's very unique looking. So the building in question is the Citigroup center building located in Midtown east in Manhattan. Are you familiar with this building?
>> Taylor: Okay, I'm looking it up. You know what building this is? This is a Mugatu building from Zoolander.
>> Farz: Oh, my God, you're right.
>> Taylor: It's the one in Zoolander. It's a giant M at the top of it because it's got you voting. Even though in real life it's like a triangle, but yes.
>> Farz: Wow. Yeah, I totally missed that. Yeah. Have you seen this building in person?
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Okay.
>> Taylor: Seen every building.
>> Farz: Can you describe it real quick? The thing that's weird about it, it's
>> Taylor: exceptionally tall for the neighborhood that it's in, I think. And then also the top is not flat. It has like a really. Like I said it was a triangle, but it's basically like a 90 degree triangle on the side of the top. I think that really stands out. And it's very, very, very far east. I don't know if that makes matters.
The building is sitting on stilts for a new skyscraper for Citigroup
>> Farz: In your thing, do you notice anything about its base that's unusual?
>> Taylor: I don't, I don't maybe. I don't know. I don't know what the base looks like. The top is very distinct. Tell me more about the base.
>> Farz: We're going to talk about the base because the base is the problem here, so.
>> Taylor: Oh, I see it. I hate it.
>> Farz: Okay, okay. Do you want to describe what you're seeing?
>> Taylor: Yes. It looks like a giant building on some little tiny a** legs.
>> Farz: There you go. That is the problem. So that's part of the problem. The part of the problem is that it's on stilts. The bigger problem are where the stilts are located. So that's what's going to cause all this kerfuffle. And you just look at it, you can tell this is wrong. This is a crime against nature, basically. So a little bit of backstory. The 1960s, the city block that you're looking at there was mostly just brownstones and a single church. In 1968, two real estate brokers, names irrelevant, started buying up parcels of land on this block under the assumption that one large parcel would be a lot more valuable than individual parcels here. Makes sense. It's New York. It's the 1970s, 60s. It's like coming up. So that tracks. The church on this block had been a holdout on selling its land. But as part of their negotiations with these brokers, and later the company that we now know as Citigroup, they agreed to sell on the condition that a new church be built for them. There are several stipulations here. That new church had to occupy the location of the current church. The new church can't be physically connected in any way whatsoever to the skyscraper. And that's a baseline requirement. You might be asking, if you have to build the church anyways, who gives a s*** about getting access to the space? There's New York has a. People can get air rights, like air rights to what's above you. You find us really well.
>> Taylor: I assume basically you're like, I can buy the air rights at the building next door to mine so that they cannot build their building higher than mine and ruin my view.
>> Farz: Exactly. It was that. So that was part of this thing, was, we'll let you build your thing here and give you the air rights to build your thing, but you have to rebuild my church and you have to do it in the exact same location it currently is. So with all that, the parcel was acquired and design work was underway for a new skyscraper for Citigroup, that basically their hq. The firm that was hired to design this was Hugh Steubens and Associates. Their first and most obvious challenge was how do you design a building when you can't use the entire footprint of the block that you're supposed to be building on?
>> Taylor: What a weird deal. Like, I don't know, we couldn't just like give them an extra million dollars and not done that.
>> Farz: They actually came quite a bit. It was, it was, it was, it was like in 19, I guess, 68. Money or. Yeah, in their money back then it was about $9 million. So it's, that's probably, I don't know, 20 million. Yeah. Or something. I also found out later on that the last holdout parcel, the very, very last one, was a record setting price for a parcel of land in New York which was $40 million. So it was. Yeah. And money back then. So who knows what that is? Like 60 million probably.
>> Taylor: It's a billion dollars.
>> Farz: It's a billion dollars for all we know. In 1973, this design firm, Hugh Stubbins and Associates, they revealed their design which included the peculiar design element of the building, which you described as sitting, sitting on stilts. But that's not weird enough. The stilts are midline, midpoint on the building. They're not on the corners of the building.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: It's really hard to describe because I'm not saying they're deeper within the central architecture of the building. What I'm saying is like they're on the outsides, they're on the facades, but they're on the middle point, the center of the building.
>> Taylor: So like the corners are like hanging over nothing.
>> Farz: The corners are hanging over nothing. Exactly.
>> Taylor: Yes.
>> Farz: The building was opened, but again, they had to do that because they had to make space for the church. They couldn't pivot the building sideways. So they were like, this is the only way we can do it is we got to build it on these weird stilts. That was the Entire point, it's this one church. The building was opened in 1977 with nearly 100% occupancy. It was really considered a success for the time. Like how quickly. Also it sounded like Citigroup was really on the come up in New York and was really establishing itself as a financial like powerhouse there. And so they had a really good easy time kind of going through the process of getting this thing occupied. The church that had been promised to be built after the previous one was destroyed for development of the area that was also open the same year as the citigroup center in 1977. So it's going to get a little bit in the weeds, actually. Put a pen and pad next to me so I can like draw things, but now I can't turn on video, so it's fine. Here was the design challenge. In a typical high rise, winds hitting the face of a building apply force that can be absorbed and distributed at the base. So in a design like this, when wind hits one face of the building, that force can then be distributed towards the back of the building and you're fine. Like nothing's going to happen. There's going to be some swaying, which we'll address later on. That's basically it to manage the wind loads, given this design, since there are. There's nothing on the corners, so there is no distribution there.
>> Taylor: And like also I said that it was very east, but I think even today, I don't know, like the age of the buildings around it, it stands out as like, what the. One of the tallest buildings really close to the river, which I imagine has more wind.
>> Farz: Oh yeah, of course, you know.
The building was on stilts and required welded trusses
So one other person who's really going to be the protagonist of the story here is this guy named William le Monsieur, who I assume is French. He is the structural engineer that was retained to do the structural engineering components of this. Beyond just the design elements that Stubbins and Associates was doing. The design he went with was to install these massive chevron trusses all up and down the facade on all sides of the building. So if you look at like the exoskeleton of the building, what it would look like is that center point where the stilts are. Once the building actually starts and the stilts stop, you have a chevron that's pointing down and it spans seven, eight floors and there's seven of them in total to these huge trusses. And the whole point of that was that because the center mass of the building was on these stilts, you now have these trusses where the support structure and the loads that each floor would have to bear get directed down from one floor to the next to these trusses. That was the entire point. Make sense?
>> Taylor: Yes.
>> Farz: So key element here, and we've talked about this before, we talked about this in the hire agency where designs change and nobody actually knows, nobody of consequence knows that the design really changed. The way that this was designed by the structural engineer was it required welded joints to create the chevron trusses. The trusses are huge. You can't. It's not one piece of metal, it's like multiple pieces of metal. And the whole point of it was you're supposed to weld them together. The other thing worth noting here is that at this time in New York, part of the city regulations was that structural integrity for buildings like this was only supposed to factor in perpendicular winds, winds that are hitting the face of the building head on. Right. Which makes sense because in any other situation like that, wind is always going to be stronger than a wind that gets deflected across the corners of the quartering winds are the ones that would hit the side of that building that all gets deflected. And so the bigger risk is always one that's going to hit you face on. In the case of this building, given that it was on stilts, that wasn't true. When winds hit the building at an angle, it's called, like I said, quartering winds. Instead of one side absorbing the load and the other three sides flexing to disperse the load, two sides take the load and the combined force isn't able to then be distributed across the remaining trusses. Makes sense.
>> Taylor: Yes. So it does. It go down to the trusses on its side. But it doesn't like distribute to the whole thing.
>> Farz: It wouldn't. The load bearing capacity of the trusses wouldn't be sufficient for a high strength wind hitting it at an angle because two trusses would have to bear the load and there would be no. The trusses on the other two side wouldn't have the corresponding strength to then offset the load that they have to bear. Again, in a regular building we wouldn't be talking about this because it's just the base, it's just the foundation. Right. It's the like if it's strong enough to hold head on, it's strong enough to hold it any, any which way. That was going to be the case here because of the trust system they put put together. And this was even before anybody even knew that they struck. They built these trusses wrong, which I'm going To describe here, I kind of foreshadowed that with a weld.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: But there's more issues that come into play here.
>> Taylor: Yeah, I'm nervous. I, I, I know exactly what you're saying. When you're like, people started making decisions and then didn't tell everybody, you're like, you need to tell exactly your decisions are. Yeah.
>> Farz: What would the. During the building phase, apparently doing welds like this in field is, like, really challenging. First off, it's really costly because someone who has the skills to do welding, it's like a union job. It's very labor intensive. You have to do it on site, which means that you are subject to the weather and you don't want to be doing this when it is, when it's super cold out, you don't want to be doing this when it's wet out. And so a cheaper solution that the builders put together was let's just do bolts. Which again, was exactly what happened with the higher Regency was let's just do bolts. And this is going to mitigate cost and time and increase efficiencies, and who cares? It's just a bolt instead of a weld.
>> Taylor: I definitely. My friend, our friend Paul from New York, he is a foreman and he's worked on like, like when they rebuilt Yankee Stadium 20 years ago, he was like one of the guys that was, like, in charge of that with working on that project. One time, like, I asked him a question that, like, he looked at me like I was an idiot, but I was like, what happens when it rains? And he was like, we keep building, like, whatever. But I'm like, aren't the wood, like, the inside of that building get wet? And he was like, well, yeah, but then just dries. And I was like, huh? Like, obviously, you know, like, stop construction on things when it rains in New York City, because you wouldn't be building half the year. But yeah, you know, but a lot of it you just do in that bad weather, you know.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah.
>> Taylor: And there's got to be, like, concessions made and stuff.
>> Farz: I imagine there was also a way to do this, which we're going to learn here in a second. Even, even if the weather was bad, it would have changed the way that they would go through the building process, but it was still sort of doable because that's actually what they ended up doing on a retrofit, which I'm going to discuss here later. So key element here, when I said nobody knows what I meant, was the structural engineer in charge of the project didn't know. His firm knew because the builder called the structural engineer firm and said, hey, we want to use bolts instead of welds for this. Is that okay? And again, somebody there looked at the New York City requirements and was like, well, if you use bolts and it's a perpendicular wind, this will hold up. That's fine. Run with it. Nobody told the lead structural engineer himself. So the builders did check. Here's why all this is relevant. So when joints are welded, they become actually, they become a minimum as strong as the parent steel, the individual pieces of steel. And in some cases they become even stronger than that parent steel loads can be supported evenly along the entire truss, which obviously is going to have less metal fatigue, less points of failure. Bolts can't do that. Bolts are a single point of failure in any situation. They are very strong. But there's several things that can go wrong with them. One being there's additional structural rigidity problems because bolts have to deal with friction and vibrations differently than a weld would instead of being a single piece of metal. And, and so that's a, that's a reason why this guy had originally architected this without bolts and with welds.
One other factor worth discussing is tune dampeners. You know what this is, right?
One other factor worth discussing is tune dampeners. You know what this is, right? Because you worked in a tall high rise.
>> Taylor: Is that just the thing that makes it move?
>> Farz: Yeah, well, it's the thing that mitigates its movement. So in very tall building skyscrapers, very tall, narrow buildings, near the very top of the building is a heavy centered mass that moves in an opposite direction from the building when the building is swaying in the wind. The point of it being it's actually not for safety. I learned it's more for comfort. So the idea was like, when the wind hits and it's shaking and like if you're the top floor, you're like, what is going on? Like, it's going to be scary, I assume.
>> Taylor: You know, and I think, I think I probably said this before, but like, I lived in a high rise building for a while and in New York and some of the apartments had like odd like jut outs on the wall that like, it was like a, like a shape of like, you can tell there was like a girder or whatever underneath it. Because when it was an office building it was okay. But once they made into apartments and people started to sleep in it, they were like, this building moves too much. And like you said, like, it wasn't like necessarily the building was going to fall down, but it was like you perceive it differently when you're laying in your bed than you do when you were working in an office. And they had to add more to it to, you know, until people would freak out.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. They were saying that with this one, when they were designing this tune damper, they were like, we could have added more structural rigidity to the, the building. This was a much more cost effective way and like, I don't know, more elegant way to solve the problem. And Citigroup was like, yeah, like we're not gonna be able to rent this thing the top floors out if this thing is shaking too much, so let's just solve it. So. And I actually also learned this. The, the city Core building was the first one from inception that actually had a tuned dampener ever installed in it. There's one that happened a year earlier, but that was a retrofit, so it's considered the first building with a tuned dampener. Apparently in the case of this building, the Dampener was a 400 ton concrete block that sat on top of pressurized oil. And I don't really know what pressurized oil is, but basically it means that it just floats on top. Like it's literally just like floating and can sway from one direction to the next. That's kind of the idea behind it. The pressurization of the oil is run by electrical systems. So without the electrical system, it's just regular oil and it's not going to be buoyant enough and slippery enough for this 400 ton concrete mass to move around. So you can see the problem. Right. If you're dealing with like incredibly high winds, you're probably also dealing with power outages. So. So you're, you got like a convergence to several factors that are coming together here.
About a year or so after the building was commemorated, this part is contested
About a year or so after the building was commemorated, this part is very contested because there's multiple people, whatever, everybody wants to be the first one to take credit. So like there's one story for one person, another story for another person. So I don't actually know what's true, but the general premise is that about a year after the building was commemorated, there's this Princeton student named Diane Hartley who was writing her thesis statement on the design of this building. And as part of her research, she determined that the quartering winds the building was likely to face were higher than the stress loads those Chevron trusses should be able to handle. She had several back and forths with the design firm. She was mostly blown off because it's like you're like some big shot design firm. It's like some 20 year old kid writing you, you know like, it's like ye. It didn't, it didn't really go anywhere.
>> Taylor: A girl.
>> Farz: Exactly. Which was. It's funny, if you read the articles about this, it actually comes up quite a bit. She submitted her thesis and that was kind of the end of it for the most part. History has determined that she's the first one that actually identified this as an issue, but she wasn't in a position to solve it. Basically later the least structural engineer was doing a Q and A via phone with some architectural students and was posed a similar question like what are you going to do about the quartering winds? Is it able to handle it? And this led him to question himself and his calculations. So he went back and started doing some research on his own math and designs of the building. And in that process he learned firsthand that they use bolts instead of welds in the trusses construction.
>> Taylor: And how long has it been open by this point?
>> Farz: A little over a year. He reran the math and determined that a 1 in 55 year storm could topple the skyscraper. That was if the tune dampeners worked. If the, if the power was shut off and the pressurization system to the oil was shut off as a result of that and the dampener stopped working, then a 1 in 16 year storm would be sufficient to take the building down. What's worse about this is this is like hurricane season in New York, right? And there were reports, I forgot the name of the hurricane was, but there was one off the coast of South Carolina that looked like it was heading towards New York. And so this guy, the structural engineer was having a really hard time. He, he legit, apparently considered suicide. Like he was like I'm telling myself it's gonna be. That's it. That would be how he solved this. Ultimately he decided to go to the head of Citicorp, he went to the design firm Steubens and Associates, he went to the insurance providers for himself and the design firm and he went to New York City Mayor Ed Koch and told them here's what's going on. And like let's put our heads together. Forgot what to do with this. This is a huge problem because if you make this public and you tell people what's going on, everyone's gonna panic. It's gonna be absolute mayhem in pandemonium.
>> Taylor: Go to work.
>> Farz: Sure. You wouldn't go to work. None of the people in the building around you would go to work. Nobody would walk around that area. All commerce would totally grind To a halt. Yeah. What ended up happening was they put together these contingency plans which were. Here is how we're going to do a forced evacuation of X number of city blocks from where this building is. Here's the timelines. And here, here's the relief shelter we're going to put in place to handle people who have to be rushed in an emergency situation who are hurt. So they actually put a lot of thought into like how to do this. But the one thing they agreed on was we cannot tell people. We can't let on that this is going on, that we're going to. Then we have this problem, basically. So the next they started working on the fix. And the fix is really simple as what I mentioned earlier. It was like just weld what was bolted.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: And, and, and, and then also install generators so that if the electric goes out, the tune damper still works.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: So that was basically the decision. And it's funny because we didn't actually know at all about any of what happened here until about 20 years later. It was 1995 when this actually came out. What happened? 1978. But what ended up happening was they brought these construction crews in and nobody would enter the building or do any work until every last person was out of the building. So every employee's gone. Then one crew would come in and start removing drywall because the trusses were buried behind the drywall. Then another crew would come in, start doing the welding, move on to the next truss in the next weld while another crew came in and then redid the walls. Right there. I kept picturing like if you're like just some cubicle office worker and you walked in like, do you smell that new paint? Like it's got to be a little like people had to know something was going on. Like that. That plant looks a little bit weird located there. It wasn't there yesterday, you know. Right.
>> Taylor: Like I think someone's been like sitting on my desk.
>> Farz: Exactly, exactly. And it's drywall, so it gets everywhere. Right. So like you probably have like dust all over the place. But I'm sure they kind of accounted with that with like janitorial services, whatnot.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Also really good fortune struck for all the parties involved here, which was there was like this three week period when this was going on where every New York publication was on a union strike. So even if someone was trying to, you know, leak information or whatever about
>> Taylor: this, there was nobody.
>> Farz: Yeah. There was nowhere for it to go. Nobody would write it, nobody would print it. So that Is no harm, no foul.
>> Taylor: Amazing.
>> Farz: In the end, after the retrofit was completed, it was theorized that now that building can sustain a 1 in 700 year storm before it is brought down.
>> Taylor: So I love that stat. Like, okay, I don't care. It could be tomorrow, it could be in 699 years.
>> Farz: I mean, okay, so I know, I was looking at that too and I was like, well, how do I determine like what that actually means? It's based on actuary tables. Like, that's actually why I think like Fukushima happened is because you look at certain situation like this is such an anomaly, it shouldn't happen in this many years. Therefore the safety, safe life cycle for this thing should be over by then. But then it happens and you're like, well s***.
If structural engineer hadn't done retrofit, water wind would have brought building down
Like we, we had a plan for that. What's interesting is that the original design part of his calculation was if they hadn't done the retrofit, a 70 mile per hour water wind would bring the building down. So the thing about an average hurricane, that's like baseline 70 miles. Like 70 miles. I think that's like Cat 1 or something. And, and they were literally looking down the face of a hurricane coming down the South Carolina coast and it turned away at the last minute. But that was also part of why all these contingencies were put into place. Like we might have a situation where a f****** giant skyscraper could be rubble in the city in 1978, which like we saw how that turned out in 2001. But like imagine how much worse it would, would be in this situation 20 years earlier.
>> Taylor: Yeah, and I think it's also in, I mean no offense to the Twin Towers, but they went down very efficiently. And like it sounds like this one would just tip over. And I said, and that's just like a, that's a different amount. Like if they, if a, if the Twin Towers had fallen like horizontally, they would have, it would have been so much worse.
>> Farz: So much worse. So much worse. Yeah, because this is on stilts. And so if a trust goes, that side goes before the next trust fails after failing to hold the load and then the next trust. So.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: Even worst case, it wouldn't be falling over to one side, it's falling on four sides. Yeah, so, so yeah, they did the retrofit. It's, it's up, it's running, it's still, it's still in use today. And much credit to the structural engineer who like literally was going to kill himself over this. Like he really had a hard time dealing with this. And it turns out that his career actually catapulted as a result to this because they were like, hey, doing the right thing makes you better at your job, not trying to hide it and sound like you don't know.
>> Taylor: As soon as he found out, it sounds like he said something, which is what you're supposed to do.
>> Farz: Yeah. And then there's a whole side quest here too, which is really fun around. Who actually brought this up first? Because originally the structural architect, the structural engineer said it was a. Some male student that brought this up to him in that Q and A I mentioned earlier. And then later on a friend named Nicole Hadley, I think it was Hadley something she came out saying, I brought this up because of my thesis paper before that conversation happened. But the theory is either because of sexism, most likely, but also possibly because of the fact that she never talked to the structural engineer directly. She only talks like staff at his office. Whereas the other student he actually did talk to directly, and he got firsthand feedback on what he thought about the quartering wins. So there's a whole debate like, who actually broke this? Who got this guy's wheels turning to figure this out? So a little fun, little side quest.
>> Taylor: That guy needs another way to talk to him. Like, if someone tells me something catastrophic, I'm not. It's not gonna not get to my boss, you know, like. But people have to, like, talk to this guy directly. Like, that's just like. It's just like. It's just funny that, like, all these things happen and the one. The one person who's gatekeeping this information is the person who doesn't know.
>> Farz: So here's. Here's the other reason why his disclosure was really incredible. Nothing would have happened to him if he hadn't done it. If the building had collapsed, killed thousands of people, nothing would have happened because he builded two code, right? Like, the code was only looking at perpendicular wins. And he was like, everything I built to spec is for that. And again, when the builders called his office, they were like, yeah, it's built to spec. Like, you can change the bolts from welds or welds to bolts, and it's going to be the specific. So he didn't have to say anything. He wouldn't have been liable for anything if the building had fallen and killed a bunch of people. And that's also part of what you're bringing up here, which is like, why does anybody you have to talk to this guy was like, well, yeah, because everybody else was looking at the sheet and look at the math and being like this works. So why, what's there to discuss? You know, scary, but. But it was good outcome. Good outcome. Really, really scary situation. It's a terrifying looking building. I. I think I'd have a hard time going inside of it because just like everything in your lizard brain is telling you that there's something wrong with this building. Just where the stilts are located and the fact that they are stilts at all makes you think.
>> Taylor: I mean, looking at it from like one of the sides, when you look at it, it looks like it's just like being. It's just like balancing on one.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: You know? Yeah. No, I don't want to be underneath it. I don't want to be in it. I don't want to be near it.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Big no thank you. For me.
>> Farz: Yeah, 100%. I'm on the same page with you on that. So that is my story. Maybe next time I'll bring a failure that actually is a failure. But this is a happy one.
>> Taylor: Yeah, it's a good one. I like it. I'm glad that everything turned out okay. It is definitely really scary.
>> Farz: Yeah. Yeah. So anyhow, that's the story. Thank you for listening.
Do we have anything to sign off with? Taylor? Notice anyone? Thank you for your suggestions. Email us with your ideas
Do we have anything to sign off with? Taylor?
>> Taylor: Notice anyone? Thank you for your suggestions. Find us at Doomed to Fail pod on all social media. Email us doomtophillpodmail.com with your ideas. We would love to hear from you. Let us know what you think. Tell me more.
>> Farz: Love to hear from you. We listen and read every bit of feedback. So please do write to us and tell us what you think.
>> Taylor: Yes.
>> Farz: Sweet. Well, I'll go ahead and cut off there. Taylor. Thank.
>> Taylor: Sam.