Talk:Citicorp Center engineering crisis

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Ready?[edit]

Any reason not to take this draft to article space?--agr (talk) 18:09, 27 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Epicgenius — Any objection?--agr (talk) 15:02, 30 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No objection from me, ArnoldReinhold. Epicgenius (talk) 15:10, 30 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The estimate of potentially casualties seems to high[edit]

The article estimates that up to 200k people could have died from the building collapsing. It names a source that also quotes the 200k. However considering that at 9/11 ~3k people died the estimate seems to be exaggerated and not realistic. I mean how many people can fit in that building and even if it collapses on a surrounding building it is not like all the buildings in Manhattan would start falling like dominos. This seems like a misquote of somebody giving a much lower estimate like 2k. 37.24.142.194 (talk) 19:28, 10 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, the number is facially preposterous. The cited reference cites another reference, which cites yet another reference, which is a BBC 30-minute video no longer available. Given the lack of documentation, I've revised it to "thousands". 2603:7000:8100:3600:1450:DE2A:6CCE:20CD (talk) 15:45, 8 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Confusion[edit]

The article seems to say Hartley (a student at Princeton) discovered the problem, but the problem was ignored or dismissed until the student DeCarolis asked LeMessurier some questions, and then LeMessurier "ended up in agreement with Hartley". But the article does not mention whether DeCarolis was aware of Hartley's work or not (or how), or whether DeCarolis was a student at Princeton or somewhere else, or whether DeCarolis was really even aware there was a problem when he asked the questions, or whether (or when) LeMessurier became aware of Hartley's analysis. There is some mention of the potential for someone to accuse DeCarolis of "seeking or stealing glory", but it is not clear why asking some questions would be the basis of glory or how he could have been stealing that glory from anyone. It does not seem clear (from what the article says) whether Hartley's work actually contributed (directly or indirectly) toward the action that was eventually taken by LeMessurier to fix the problem. Did DeCarolis or LeMessurier ever read her thesis? Did Billington play any role in communicating Hartley's findings to DeCarolis or LeMessurier? The article also contains a comment that appears to say that NIST did a reassessment and concluded there wasn't really a problem to begin with, but doesn't really say anything more about that. If the whole thing was a false alarm and there was no real problem in the first place, that information should be highlighted and explained more thoroughly in the article. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 04:17, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In agreement here with BarrelProof-- I'm also concerned because much of the cited articles are from Lee DeCarolis himself, and aren't from outside sources confirming the call. The blog article cited he authored. 2601:449:4200:5310:BDAD:6C59:A2E2:F932 (talk) 16:07, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Online Ethics article by DeCarolis confirms that DeCarolis and LeMessurier were not aware of the thesis by Hartley, and that it was really "Professor Zoldos" of New Jersey Institute of Technology (who was also apparently not aware of the thesis by Hartley) who had raised the concern about the structure that was relayed to LeMessurier. DeCarolis had no independent thoughts on the subject. He said he was just a "freshman architecture student" and was just relaying what his professor had said, explaining that "I must have seemed hopelessly ignorant to LeMessurier, telling him that my professor thought the building columns were in the wrong places". Of course, the source of this information is DeCarolis, but no clear (direct or indirect) connection between Hartley and LeMessurier is evident anywhere. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 21:13, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also, LeMessurier directly described the phone calls with the student, and said the student was male. If the student was female, he presumably would have remembered that. He describes the phone calls with the student in his 1995 lecture at MIT, for which a video recording is available on YouTube. He refers to the New Yorker article in the lecture, so the lecture was after the article. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 20:54, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]