Einstein's Refrigerator: And Other Stories from the Flip Side of History

by Steve Silverman

  This accident is certainly one that will stick in the minds of Bostonians for many years to come.

  Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

  Citicorp touter

  watch out for the leaning tower of citibank

  if you have been to New York City at some point in the past twenty years, you almost certainly know all about the Citicorp Tower. The building can’t be missed. As it is the only skyscraper with a triangular roof, it seems to have been made in honor of Mr. Pythagoras (of right-triangle fame) himself.

  What few people seem to know, however, is that this gigantic structure came very close to falling down on the people of Manhattan Island. If it hadn’t been for the keen observations of a New Jersey college student, tens of thousands of lives might have been lost in one single catastrophe.

  So, let’s start with a little background on this superstructure.

  1 guess that we could go all the way back to Otis’ invention of the safety elevator, but we’ll save that story for another time. Instead, let’s go back to 1977. The mighty city of New York was on the verge of bankruptcy and crime was riding high. No one saw much future in this place. (Some still don’t.)

  One bright spot in 1977 was the opening of the Citicorp Tower. This fifty-nine-story behemoth was an engineering marvel that seemed to offer a glimmer of hope to a quickly fading city. Built for a mere $175 million, the building was extremely light for its size and included many engineering innovations.

  Although the skyscraper’s roofline is its most prominent feature when viewed from the distance, it is really the base of the building that is most interesting. It seems that the tower’s designers were faced with a unique challenge-St. Peter’s Lutheran Church was located at one comer of the building site. The church agreed to allow Citibank the right to build in the air above the church, but not the ground that the church stood on. In exchange for these “air rights,” Citibank agreed to build a new church on that comer to replace the old dilapidated building.

  What to do? What to do?

  Leave it to the engineers to come up with the perfect solution. They simply cut off the comer support of the building, so that the building would hover some seventy-two feet out over the church. In fact, while they were at it, they decided to remove all four corner supports on the building. By performing some mathematical trickery, the supports were moved from the four comers in toward the center of each side of the building. Yes, the building today stands on just four narrow nine-story-high stilts, one located in the center of each wall of the skyscraper. (Spooky, huh?)

  Okay. So now let’s zoom a little bit closer to the present. It’s June 1978 and the Citicorp Tower has been standing for about a year. The grand opening celebration is over and all those involved in the project have moved on to bigger and better things.

  The phone rings in the office of William LelVlessurier, the project’s chief structural engineer.

  Rinnggg!

  The call was from that college student in New Jersey briefly mentioned at the top of this story. It seems that the student’s professor had given him a project. It was one of those dreaded research paper-writing assignments that kids love so much. He was to study the Citicorp Tower and reduce his findings to words.

  The student told LeMessurier that his professor claimed that the support columns were put in the wrong place. They should have been placed at the corners of the building, not the center (no, duh!).

  Of course, LeMessurier explained to the student the rationale behind placing the supports in the center of each building face, and assured the student that all was safe. In fact, LeMessurier explained that the positioning of the supports made the building ideal for withstanding quartering winds-winds that come in at a fortyfive-degree angle and hit two sides of the building simultaneously.

  LeMessurier hung up the phone. LeMessurier was sure that the building was well designed and was not about to fall down. He decided to use the topic of conversation in a structural engineering class that he taught. Since New York City building codes required only calculations on perpendicular winds, none were ever done for quartering winds. So, LeMessurier sat down to figure them out.

  Of greatest interest to LeMessurier was one of the building’s unique design features. Anyone who has done even the simplest construction knows that the strongest way to reinforce a rectangle is to place a diagonal brace across it. LeMessurier did just that on a grand scale. To strengthen the structure’s shell, a series of diagonal steel girders (which, when grouped together, formed a series of chevrons) were incorporated.

  LeMessurier’s calculations showed that half of the building’s chevrons would encounter a 40 percent increase in stress when hit by a quartering wind.

  This increase in stress could easily be absorbed into the building’s original design. But there was a problem. LeMessurier had learned just several weeks earlier while working on plans for a new tower in Pittsburgh that his design for the Citicorp Tower had been slightly modified. It seems that LeMessurier had specified welded joints for the diagonal braces, but the contractor chose weaker bolted joints instead. The bolting was significantly cheaper and helped to speed up completion of the building. From an engineering standpoint, this was a legitimate substitution, and there was no need to consult LeMessurier.

  Unfortunately, LeMessurier’s calculations did not confirm this. It seems that the use of bolted joints translated a simple 40 percent increase in stress into a 160 percent increase.

  Uh-oh!

  Could the bolts handle this kind of force?

  LeMessurier found out the answer on July 26, 1978. Wind tunnel tests were conducted at the University of Western Ontario with a scale model of the tower. With the reduced strength of the Citicorp structure calculated in, it was determined by LeMessurier that the building had a 50 percent chance of blowing down if exposed to a sustained wind speed of seventy miles per hour for five minutes. This is the type of wind that statistically occurs every sixteen years-in what we common folk call a hurricane.

  Let’s hear a really big UH-OH! We could have a disaster on our hands.

  LeMessurier had some tough decisions to make. He could keep quiet and hope that nothing ever went wrong with the building. On the other hand, coming forward and stating the problem straight out could have great consequences for LeMessurier-almost certain bankruptcy due to litigation and loss of his professional reputation.

  Luckily for New York, LeMessurier chose the correct path. He decided to blow the whistle on himself.

  LeMessurier met with lawyers from his insurer, and they called in additional engineers to assess the problem. It was determined that Citibank officials had to be notified, but getting in touch with top officials at a big corporation is simpler said than done. One could just go to a Citibank teller window and blurt out, “The building is going to collapse and kill thousands of New Yorkers!” but that probably would start a citywide panic. Instead, LeMessurier had to make his way through the many layers of administrative staff to get to the head honchos.

  Eventually, building architect Hugh Stubbins was able to get an appointment with Citicorp’s executive vice president John S. Reed. Reed had an engineering background and was involved in the skyscraper’s design and construction. Reed immediately realized the urgency of the situation and arranged an appointment with Citibank’s chairman Walter Wriston.

  LeMessurier told the Citicorp brass that he had a plan to fix the building, but time was of the essence. It was August 2 and the hurricane season was fast approaching. There was no assurance that the building could actually survive.

  LeMessurier proposed that H-shaped steel “bandages” be welded on to each of the building’s two hundred dangerous joints. This would allow the building to withstand winds that only occur every thousand years or so.

  But LeMessurier also had one more thing on his side. Since the building was so light, it had a tendency to sway a great deal in the wind. He designed a device known as a tuned mass damper to moderate the tower�
��s sway. The damper was the first of its kind and relied on Newton’s First Law-the principle of inertia. The damper consisted of a four-hundred-ton concrete block that slid on a steel pan filled with oil. Clearly, they could not depend on the damper to save the building, but it could help it withstand stronger winds. Backup generators were installed for the damper to ensure that it would not fail during a blackout.

  Citibank knew that the problem had to be kept a secret to avoid panic. Yet, they needed to come up with a way to evacuate midtown Manhattan in a moment’s notice.

  Three organizations were contacted: the Red Cross, the National Weather Service, and the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management.

  The Red Cross calculated that a catastrophic collapse could result in a domino effect that would affect up to 156 midtown blocks. Officials secretly proceeded to map out all of the activities of the people around the Citicorp Tower. To collect these demographics, the Red Cross volunteers were told that they were doing a marketing survey. In those days, before high-speed computers, the Red Cross volunteers had to catalog the city street by street and block by block using only clipboards. They had no idea what they were really collecting the data for.

  On Tuesday, August 8, Citibank posted notices stating that the wind bracing system was going to be reinforced and that the engineers on the project had assured them that there was no danger.

  Construction began.

  As soon as the office staff left each night, the crews ripped the fireproofing gypsum off the wall so the welders could install the two-inch-thick plates. By 4 A.M. the welders stopped and the cleanup crews came in. By the time the office staff came back in the next day, one could hardly tell that any work had been done-everything was practically back to normal.

  But one strange effect could be seen across the city skyline. One could easily see the glow of the welders diagonally up and down the chevrons. This strange sparkling glow was initially reported by the Wall Street Journal on August 9, but no follow-up was done. Everything was still a secret.

  That was until the New York Times called LeMessurier’s office inquiring into what was going on. LeMessurier realized that the cat was about to be let out of the bag. However, he lucked out. When LeMessurier went to return the phone call at six o’clock, he heard a message that said that the New York Times had gone on strike just at that moment. The secret remained.

  Weather predictions were filed four times a day from the National Weather Service at the RCA Building.

  On September 1, it was predicted that Hurricane Ella was moving up the East Coast and was headed for New York. Could this be the storm that blew over the building? Should they evacuate the city? Luckily, before a final decision was made, the hurricane moved out to sea and the alarm was called off.

  Work continued until mid-October, without a storm with high-magnitude winds ever occurring. In fact, in all the years since, no storm of high magnitude has touched Manhattan.

  Clearly, the building survived (check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me), and the evacuation plan that was actually known as Plan No. 828 was never used.

  To think that it took a phone call from a college student to save the lives of thousands of people… .

  Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

  the lake peigneur

  disaster

  and away goes the lake down the drain!

  Flashback to Thursday, November 21, 1980. This day may seem of little importance to you. If you were living near New Iberia, Louisiana, however, you will probably never be able to forget the strange series of events that took place on this date.

  Initially, this day started out just like any other day. (All strange stories seem to begin this way.) The sun was just about to rise on Lake Peigneur. Located on this 1,300-acre lake, which was just three feet in depth, was Jefferson Island, home to the beautiful Live Oak Gardens botanical park. Contrasting with this natural beauty were the many oil and gas wells dotting the lake’s perimeter.

  Here we find the Wilson Brothers Corporation, which had been hired by Texaco, drilling a test hole at Well Number 20. The first 1,227 feet of drilling seemed to go very smoothly. But something started to go haywire at 1,228 feet.

  The five-man night crew had run into some drilling problems during their shift and decided to stay awhile until the seven-man day crew showed up at 6 A.M. By 6:30 A.M., the drilling rig started to tilt slightly. The crew suspected that the drilling rig was collapsing under their feet. They radioed Texaco’s district office in New Iberia about the problem. Both crews decided to abandon the platform and head for shore, which was just two hundred to three hundred yards away.

  The water of Lake Peigneur slowly started to turn, eventually forming a giant whirlpool. A large crater developed in the bottom of the lake. It was as if someone pulled the stopper out of the bottom of a giant bathtub.

  The crater grew larger and larger, eventually reaching sixty yards in diameter. The water went down the hole faster and faster. The lake, which was connected by the Delcambre Canal to the Gulf of Mexico some twelve miles away, caused the canal to lower by 3.5 feet and to start flowing in reverse. A fifty-foot waterfall (the highest ever to exist in the state) formed where the canal water emptied into the crater.

  The whirlpool easily sucked up the $5 million Texaco drilling platform, a second drilling rig that was nearby, a tugboat, eleven barges from the canal, a barge loading dock, seventy acres of Jefferson Island and its botanical gardens, parts of greenhouses, a house trailer, trucks, tractors, a parking lot, tons of mud, trees, and who knows what else. A natural gas fire broke out where the Texaco well was being drilled. Let’s not forget the estimated 1.5 billion gallons of water that seemed to magically drain down the hole. (Does the Coriolis effect come into play here?) Of course, there was the great threat of environmental and economic catastrophe.

  I’m sure that by now you are wondering what could cause this mess? And, since the Earth is not hollow, where did all that water go?

  It was actually quite simple: Texaco was drilling on the edge of a salt dome. Unfortunately, salt domes tend to be the home of salt mines. Yes, they drilled right into the third level of the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine that had been operating nearby.

  It’s not that Texaco was unaware of the salt mine. They knew it was in the vicinity, but they did not know that it was exactly where they were drilling. Texaco had contacted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had, in turn, contacted Diamond Crystal. Unfortunately, the necessary communications failed to take place and the disaster occurred.

  Of course, freshwater in a salt mine is a big problem. When the water comes in contact with the salt, the salt dissolves. And, of course, in a salt mine, most of the sodium chloride (salt) is removed and pillars of salt are left in place to support the roof above. (Most of the tunnels in this mine were as wide as fourlane highways with eighty-foot-high ceilings.) Dissolve these pillars and all the land on the surface will start to cave in. Which, in turn, means that the small hole that Texaco drilled became bigger and bigger as the salt dissolved.

  1 should mention that there were fifty workers in the mine when the disaster occurred. An electrician working in the mine noticed that water was starting to collect at his feet and heard the gurgling of water over his head. He quickly called in the alarm. Luckily, the mineworkers had just held a safety drill on the previous Saturday, so they knew exactly what to do. The lights were flashed on and off three times and a paging system was used to contact all workers about the evacuation order.

  Nine of the miners were working in the 1,300-foot third level. They immediately hopped into the mine’s steel cage and were hoisted to safety.

  The remaining forty-one workers were working at 1,500 feet below the surface on the fourth level. They quickly ran up to the third level, only to find that the corridor to the elevators was blocked by waist-deep water. The workers were able to use some of the carts and diesel-powered vehicles in the mine to drive to the 1,000-foot level, where they caught
an elevator to the surface.

  That was one close call! Of course, they all now had to face an even tougher challenge-they were suddenly unemployed. After two days of water pouring in, the mine was totally filled and the heavy-duty equipment used to mine the salt was destroyed.

  Although three dogs perished, there was no loss of human life. One man, Leonce Viator Jr., was actually out fishing with his nephew Timmy on his fourteen-foot aluminum boat when the disaster struck. The water drained so quickly that the boat got stuck in the mud and they were able to walk away! Luck was certainly on their side. (Did you ever notice how people get more upset when a dog dies in these oddball stories? They seem unmoved when it’s a person.)

  Federal mine safety experts from the Mine Safety and Health Administration found it impossible to determine who was to blame for the salt dome collapse, mainly because all of the evidence went down the drain. Of course, a disaster like this leads to endless lawsuits. Diamond Crystal sued Texaco. Texaco countersued Diamond Crystal. The Live Oak Gardens sued both Diamond Crystal and Texaco. One woman sued Texaco and Wilson Brothers for $1.45 million for injuries (bruised ribs and an injured back) received while escaping from the salt mine. In the end, Texaco and Wilson Brothers agreed to pay $32 million to Diamond Crystal and $12.8 million to the Live Oak Gardens in out-of-court settlements.

  Eventually, the land above the salt mine stabilized and life returned to normal. The Live Oak Gardens was rebuilt on its remaining land. The environmental catastrophe that was anticipated at the time of the accident never materialized. Nine of the barges eventually popped back up like corks, but the drilling rigs and tug were never to be seen again. The salt mine was permanently closed, but most of the workers were able to find suitable employment. The torrent of water helped dredge Delcambre Canal and made it two to four feet deeper. And of course, the threefoot-deep Lake Peigneur was now thirteen hundred feet deep!