Read the article again. What information does it give about: 1 William LeMessurier? 4 the precautions taken during the repair work? 2 the restrictions affecting the design? 5 how the story broke? 3 the flaw in the design? Read the information and examples in the box. Then answer the questions on the next page. b LeMessurier had accounted for the perpendicular winds, but not the quartering winds. He checked the math and found that the student was right. He compared what velocity winds the building could withstand with weather data and found that a storm strong enough to topple the Citicorp Center hits New York City every 55 years. But that would only be if the tuned mass damper, which keeps the building stable, were running. LeMessurier realized that a major storm could cause a blackout and render the tuned mass damper inoperable. Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hits New York every 16 years. In other words, for every year the Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse. LeMessurier and his team, hard-pressed by disaster looming over their heads, worked with Citicorp to coordinate emergency repairs. The repairs, among other things, included welding over the chevron tips, which up until then had only been bolted together, for greater structural loads. With the help of the NYPD, they worked out an evacuation plan spanning a 10-block radius, decreed by the city administration. They had 2,500 Red Cross volunteers on standby and three different weather services employed 24/7 to keep an eye out for potential windstorms. They welded throughout the night and quit at daybreak, just as the building’s occupants returned to work. But all of this happened in secret, even as Hurricane Ella was racing up the eastern seaboard. Hurricane Ella never made landfall, and so the public – including the building’s occupants – were never notified. And it just so happened that the New York City newspapers were on strike at the time. The story remained a secret until writer Joe Morgenstern overheard it being told at a party, and interviewed LeMessurier. Morgenstern broke the story in The New Yorker in 1995. And that would have been the end of the story. But then this happened: The BBC aired a special on the Citicorp Center crisis, and one of its viewers was Diane Hartley. It turned out that she was the student in LeMessurier’s story. She never spoke with LeMessurier; rather, she spoke with one of his junior members of staff. Hartley didn’t know that her inquiry about how the building dealt with quartering winds led to any action on LeMessurier’s part. It was only after seeing the documentary that she began to learn about the impact that her undergraduate thesis had had on the fate of Manhattan. Language focus Describing objects – past participle clauses 5 a You can describe a noun (phrase) with a past participle clause. ■■ The Citicorp Center, built in 1977, … A past participle clause has a similar meaning to a relative clause with the passive: ■■ The Citicorp Center, which was built in 1977, … There are two kinds of past participle clauses: 1 Defining Designs impacted on by building restrictions have to be spectacular by nature. 2 Non-defining LeMessurier and his team, hard-pressed by disaster looming over their heads, worked with Citicorp … They worked out an evacuation plan spanning a 10-block radius, decreed by the city administration. Language skills Extras Explore 10 From design to brands 133 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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