Posted Nov 7, 2012, 3:10 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,901
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JACKinBeantown
And to think, we knew this building before it became famous.
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Well, we still have that other skyline shocking tower going up a few blocks down the street to ourselves (for now).
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/ny...manhattan.html
As Crane Hung in the Sky, a Drama Unfolded to Prevent a Catastrophe Below
By CHARLES V. BAGLI
November 6, 2012
Quote:
Michael Alacha, a New York City buildings engineer, was racing up the stairwell of a 74-story luxury skyscraper being built in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. Hurricane Sandy was battering the region, and Mr. Alacha was trying to avert a disaster. High above him, a 150-foot crane boom next to the building, one of the tallest construction projects in North America, was dangling. It had twisted and crumpled in the 80-mile-an-hour winds and was now threatening to plunge 1,000 feet to the street, onto a natural gas main, and possibly cause a major explosion.
The story of what happened next at 157 West 57th Street, where a billionaire has agreed to pay $95 million for the duplex penthouse, suggests how close the city was last week to a catastrophe at the site.....Mr. Alacha, in an interview this week, said that in the hours after the accident, he estimated that there was an 80 percent chance that the 26,000-pound boom would plummet to the street. “We still had another 6 to 10 hours of severe wind,” he said. “It was rocking. Usually, metal gets fatigued and it would let go.” For Mr. Alacha, 54, the dangling crane became an obsession, even as his home on the Rockaway Peninsula suffered flooding and his family was forced to move in with relatives.
On the day that Hurricane Sandy arrived, Nicholas J. Grecco, a senior vice president at Lend Lease, the construction company at the site, returned to his apartment on Fifth Avenue at 62nd Street after an 11-hour shift at the building. He had been making sure that equipment, materials and hatches were tied down, he said. As Mr. Grecco kicked off his boots at 2:35 p.m., he glanced out his window, which offered a view through the tree line of the 57th Street tower. Suddenly, he said, the crane’s boom disappeared from sight. He bolted back on foot to the construction site.
On Saturday morning, three riggers climbed inside the turntable at the top of the crane, where they disengaged the hydraulic motor before manually cranking the turntable counterclockwise, until the boom hugged the side of the building. Workers then tied the boom with eight cables to building columns on three floors for stability. Lend Lease, which brought in experts from Europe and Australia, intends to cut the broken boom into five-foot sections in order to haul it down from the tower in the construction hoist. The company plans to install a new crane to continue work on the building, which is scheduled to be finished next year.
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Explanation of graphic...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...l?ref=nyregion
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Agreed, but it's sad that it had to take a hurricane to cause it. Meh, I'll take anything to get more buildings in the skyline known.
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