Transcript
Q56PMJbCFXQ • How a Student's Question Saved This NYC Skyscraper
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This is City Corp Center. In the summer
of 1978, it had been open for less than
a year when its structural engineer,
Bill Lameasure, made a terrifying
discovery. His cuttingedge skyscraper,
an engineering marvel, had a fatal flaw.
Winds of just 110 kmh could cause it to
collapse in the middle of Manhattan,
potentially killing thousands. Over
200,000 people lived and worked in the
surrounding area, and hurricane season
was only weeks away. Here I am, the only
man in the world who knew this. This
thing is in real trouble. Lameasure
faced a stark choice. He could stay
silent and hope for the best, or he
could try to fix it and risk
professional ruin and mass panic. But
City Corp Center had a 100% probability
of total collapse by the end of the
century. How could he save New York from
a near certain disaster? And how was
this allowed in the first place?
Veritassium producer and engineer Henry
Van Djk traveled to New York to
investigate
further. So in the 1960s, the financial
giant City Corp was trying to build a
new headquarters in Manhattan. So just
down the street from their original
headquarters was this entire city block
which was up for sale. Well, everything
except for this church, St. Peters. So,
City Corp came to the pastor, Ralph
Peterson, and asked, "What's it going to
take for you guys to leave?" And he came
back and said, "We're not leaving."
Anything that City Corp builds has to
involve the church as part of it. What
the pastor wanted was for the church to
have its own separate identity. So,
eventually they agreed on two things.
One was to replace this old crumbling
Gothic church with a brand new one,
which you see in front of you. And the
second thing was that the church had to
be physically distinct from the new
tower. In other words, it had to be
completely independent. And again, most
importantly, 2/3 of the space above the
church had to be free and clear, had to
be open.
City Corp then hired architect Hugh
Stubbins to design the tower and the
church and Bill measure as the
structural engineer. Stubbins explained
the constraints they faced. The church
needed to be in the exact same spot and
they needed to build the tower around
it. If they were to maximize the floor
area, they would have to notch out one
corner of the tower for the church.
Lameasure agreed that could work. But
why not notch two, three, or even all
four corners? Essentially constructing
the skyscraper on stilts. So, it's
probably the first time in history that
an engineer has come to an architect
said, "Let's make our job harder for
us."
The stilts would serve two main
purposes. First, they would need to
support at least half of the building's
gravity load. The rest would be held up
by a larger central column. Second, they
would need to withstand the load due to
high winds. But unlike an ordinary
structure, the stilts wouldn't be at the
corners. They would be at the center of
each face. Imagine a chair and instead
of the columns or the supports on each
corner of the chair, it's at the
midpoint of each side. Obviously, it's
not an ideal situation. It doesn't seem
very stable. Exactly. So, it created an
engineering problem. As Laame considered
the problem, he suddenly had a flash of
inspiration. He grabbed a napkin and
sketched out an idea. He drew six layers
of diagonal braces up each face of the
tower. These chevrons would transfer the
forces to the middle of each face and
down to the
stilts. Now we have to see the gravity
loads, right? But now here's the trick.
The gravity loads are coming down the
column. When they get to the brace, they
need to find their way into the brace.
Okay? So what you do is you take out
that column right there. There is no way
that load can jump over and go to that
column. And now they're coming down into
the braces. They get down to the bottom
here. And now they continue to go down.
You take that column out. It has nowhere
to go except into the brace. By removing
the columns at the top and middle of
each chevron, every tier acted as a
separate unit. They were only connected
to the braces and through the central
core. So every eight stories, half of
the gravity load would be forced through
the chevrons to the midface columns
leading down to the stilts. Can you tell
me how big of a new idea was this? Yeah.
Well, this particular system was
entirely unique, driven by the placement
of the columns, driven by the conditions
of the building. Satisfied the chevrons
could transfer the gravity load,
Lameasure turned his attention to the
second problem, the wind. When wind hits
the left side of a normal building with
corner columns, the entire frame deforms
like this. So to reduce this
deformation, we could strengthen these
joints. But there's a better way.
Because beams and columns are much
stronger in compression or tension than
they are with bending loads. So if we
add diagonal bracing, they can carry
this horizontal load. The beams sort of
act like springs, and when they're
compressed, they push on the joints.
When they're stretched, they pull
inwards. With braces like these, the
wind load compresses this diagonal and
stretches this one. The left column
pulls down in tension and the right
column pushes up in compression. Where
the braces meet, they both push the
bottom beam to the right. This stretches
the left side and compresses the right
one. But this floor is the top of the
next chevron. So this lower section is
carrying the force from the layer above
it and the normal wind load from the
side. And this keeps happening at every
chevron. So the wind load builds up as
you go down the building. But City Corp
can't have corner columns like this
because of the gravity load. So in the
wind, this entire triangle wants to
rotate like this. And to prevent that
from happening, this chevron pulls down
by going into tension. And the far
chevron pushes up in compression. The
top and bottom beams are again forced
into compression and tension. The wind
load ends up wrapping around the entire
building. So every chevron works to
transfer the wind load to the section
below.
When we think about skyscrapers, like
how big of a deal is wind? If we made a
skyscraper here, you know, out of all
these different things, you push with
your phone, you get a certain amount of
force, but then you push on my phone as
well with a certain amount of force, but
your phone is also pushing on my phone.
And so that's the shear in the building,
what we call the building shear. It
increases as you go down the building.
You know, at the 20 at the 10th floor,
you may have a smaller force than at the
60th floor, but the total force of the
10th floor is like carrying everything
above it. So, it's much bigger than
what's going on at the 60th floor.
So, these chevrons were key to
Lameasure's design. But the braces were
massive, almost 40 m long end to end.
So, even if you could fabricate a steel
brace that long, there would be no way
to get it through Manhattan. So,
instead, it was sent in pieces to be
welded together on
site. The chevron bracing solved the
wind and gravity load issues, but it
also created a different problem.
Because of the chevron bracing system,
they were able to save a lot of money
and weight. It was a lighter construct
than most other buildings in New York. I
think it was 22 lb a square foot, which
is very light. Unfortunately, that made
the building swayable. It could move in
the wind. That wasn't necessarily a
structural problem. It was just it could
have been uncomfortable for the patrons.
The way they could solve this was just
let's add more structural steel and make
it a lot stiffer. But the solution that
Leame came up with was far more
elegant. He adopted something that had
been regularly used in bridges, power
lines, and ships, but never before in a
building, a tuned mass damper or TMD.
So, we're here at Stark Laboratories and
I'm not with Iron Man, but instead the
Columbia Space Initiative, a student
team here on campus who has helped us
build this incredible tune mass
damper kind of system. We'll use this
cart to represent a building. By pulling
it back and releasing it, we can excite
its resonant frequency. And then we'll
put on a little pendulum, aluminum rod,
and a mass at the bottom.
As the building sways, it transfers some
of its kinetic energy to the pendulum,
which starts to swing. Then some of its
energy is dissipated through friction at
the hinge. The pendulum and the building
oscillate out of phase from each other.
So every time the building pulls the
pendulum in a different direction, more
energy is lost, significantly damping
the sway of the
tower. But this system needs to be
carefully tuned so it has the same
frequency as the building itself and the
right amount of friction.
So, first the mass needs to be at least
1 to 5% of the building's weight to be
effective. And we tune the frequency of
the TMD by adjusting the length of the
pendulum. I assume engineers do math
around this thing, but we're just doing
it by feel.
Second, by loosening or tightening the
bolt, we can tune the amount of damping.
We need to dissipate more energy from
friction at the hinge to stop the
swaying faster. We just tighten this top
bolt to make the whole system a little
bit, you know, add a little bit more
resistance. And we'll see if we can
dampen it now further.
[Music]
Woo! Much different. Yeah, that looked
great. That was so quick. Yeah, that was
It is cool when an experiment works.
Does not always happen.
There are many different types of TMDs
like pendulums, liquid columns, and a
large mass on springs. Lameasure used
this last one in City Corp. What you see
is a mass of concrete which is 29 ft
square and about 8 ft thick and weighs
400 tons. It was installed on the top
floor and it's affectionately known as
that great block of cheese. As City Corp
sways to one side, the block starts to
move in the same direction. Some energy
is dissipated through separate viscous
dampers. City Corps oscillations are
damped through those energy losses as
the block oscillates out of phase to the
building's motion. Lameasure expected
the damper to reduce the amplitude of
swaying by roughly 50%. And he saved
around $4 million by not needing an
additional 2,800 tons of structural
steel. With both the chevron bracing to
channel forces to the stilts and the
tune mass damper to reduce sway,
Lameasure was convinced the building was
structurally sound.
On City Corp Center Cent's opening day
in 1977, it was the 11th tallest
building in the world. It was described
by the press as an acrobatic act of
architecture. Later, the American
Institute of Architects even gave it an
honor award, calling it a tour to force
as a stylish silhouette in the skyline
and for the pedestrian, a hovering
cantalvered hulk. So then it's going
swimmingly for for years, right? Well,
it's going swimmingly for about a year,
but the first hint of trouble came in
May 1978. Lameasure was talking with
another client about welding similar
chevron braces. The architect and the
steel fabricator said, "Tell me, how did
those uh welded braces work out? Seems
like overkill," they thought. And
Lameasure says, "Yeah, they they were
fine. Let me call my guys in New York
and I'll check." So he put the call into
his office in New York and they say,
"Oh, Bill, didn't you know we bolted
those connections?" The contractor had
suggested saving a quart of a million
dollars by using bolts to attach the
braces instead of welds. And Lame's firm
had agreed. There is nothing that says a
bolt is inherently worse or better than
a weld. You use them in different
circumstances for different reasons. But
it's a little surprising to find out. I
thought the connections in this tour to
force one-of-a-kind skyscraper, you
know, that's on the cutting edge of
structural engineering was connected one
way, but it's apparently it's connected
another way. But if the braces are going
like this, where are they going to go?
You know, you only need the weld when
the braces are going like this. Since
the gravity load was always compressing
the braces, some of the chevrons only
went into tension under very high winds.
And even then, it wasn't a lot of
tension. Lameasure trusted that his team
did the right calculations and the
substitution was fine, logical
even. But around a month later,
Lameasure got a phone call from a
student who wanted to ask some questions
about the City Corp Center. And his
teacher said to him, "That engineer
didn't know what he's doing, and nobody
should put the columns in the middle.
They should put them in the corners.
That's silly." And I told the student, I
said, "Well, your your professor is full
of it. He doesn't understand the problem
we had to solve. Lameasure went through
the calculations with the student to
reassure him the stilts were in the
right place. But the interesting thing
is is in that moment he's thinking about
wind loads from all
directions. You know, late spring, early
summer of 1978, Bill Lameasure is
working on the Back Bay Hilton Hotel
that in plan forms a triangle, not a
rectangle. Now you got a triangle.
What's your orthogonal direction? You
just have to give up and say, "We're
going to analyze it from every direction
that's going on the moment that Bill
measure gets this phone call." Then I
called him back and pointed out to him
that there were some peculiar things
about this building. The worst loading
case was not the diagonal, but it was
the ordinary wind that everybody thinks
about. The wind pushes straight on the
building. That was the critical case. He
said, "You know what? I've been getting
all these calls from all these people.
I'm going to sit down and explain this
thing."
He decided to double check what happens
to the building if wind is hitting a
corner of the building, not straight on
one of the faces. These are also known
as quartering winds. So he split the
wind into its perpendicular components.
So the west side and north side are hit
by the force divided by the<unk> of two.
He computed the forces for each as we
did before and summed up the result. But
then he noticed something strange. And
now we look at the diagonals. The
stresses in half of them vanish and in
the other half double. Since the force
on each side was F over the<unk> of two,
these beams get double that. Compared to
Lameasure's calculations for the
perpendicular wind load, the forces here
were 40%
higher. So 1.4 by itself is not enough
to wreck havoc. Okay, it may be, but it
may not be. Okay. So then the question
is, well, what happens?
This increase in forces wouldn't have
mattered in the original design since
the chevrons were fully welded together.
But that wasn't the case anymore. Lame
remembered his earlier phone call. The
welds holding the chevrons together were
swapped for bolts. How did his team
calculate the number of bolts per joint?
Did they consider quartering winds? It
would be a miracle if they ever thought
that through to think about the diagonal
wind. It just wasn't in the nature of
anybody. So, I had a bit of a worry. I
didn't panic right away, but I decided
to go down to New York to my office.
Lameasure requested the building
diagrams and poured over all of the
connections. He looked at how his firm
calculated the number of bolts. There
was no question they had taken straight
on wind, not the diagonal wind. Although
wind speed is highest at the top of the
tower, the wind shear builds up as you
go lower. Looking at this brace around
halfway down the tower, the
perpendicular wind load is 454 tons.
Because of the skipped columns, all of
these braces carry the same gravity
load, just 340 tons from the 8 stories
above. The gravity load builds up in the
center column, not in the braces, which
means there are 114 tons of tension in
this brace. If each bolt can withstand
around 28 tons, that would require four
bolts. The original calculations said
just four bolts were enough. So, that
was all they used. But when he added
quartering winds, Lameasure's
calculations showed there were some
braces that needed far more bolts at
this particular part of the building,
which I can show you on my calculations
is right about here. And Bill measure
talked about the 30th floor. And I
always wondered why was it at the 30th
floor? The 40% increase from quartering
winds means that this brace has a wind
load of 635 tons. The tension in the
brace is now 295 tons, over double the
original calculation. So these braces
actually need around 10 bolts, not four.
But then it turned out they had done
something else. Lame's firm considered
the braces to be minor structural
elements. They didn't use the right
factor of safety to calculate the number
of bolts. They should have overestimated
the tension in the brace by
underestimating the gravity load. With
only 75% of the gravity load, the
tension in the beam is now 380 tons. So
they really needed 14 bolts, but they
used only
four. This thing is in real trouble. You
imagine, you know, what Bill Lameasure
was thinking at that moment. You see
that number and you're like, "Oh my god,
this is serious. It's really serious."
Lameasure was starting to panic. He
didn't want to rush to conclusions, so
he flew to Canada to check his
calculations with Alan Davenport at the
boundary layer wind tunnel. After
running more tests, they found that it
was even worse than Lameasure
thought. The estimated 40% increase in
stress was technically correct, but
Lameasure made his calculations assuming
the building wasn't moving. This is
called static conditions. But the wind
tunnel gave Lameasure a dynamic
analysis. how the forces change when the
building is moving around. To
Lameasure's horror, the wind tunnel
analysis showed that the stresses could
increase up to 60% more than originally
anticipated. Lameasure squirreled
himself away in Maine and worked through
the data from the wind tunnel again,
joint by joint on every floor. The
weakest joints were at the building's
30th floor. If those failed, the entire
building would fall.
But what were the chances that a storm
strong enough to topple the building
would pass through New York City?
Lameasure dug through the historical
weather reports. On average, a storm
strong enough to tear the building apart
occurred every 67 years, but only if the
tuned mass damper was working. If a
storm knocked out power, then even 110
km perph winds blowing for just 5
minutes would collapse the building. In
any given year, the chance of a storm
that size happening was 1
in6. Just one year before City Corp. was
completed, wind gusts of 110 km/h roared
through New York City as Hurricane Bell
passed through.
What do you think this moment was like
for Lameasure when he ran these
calculations? Like, oh, I it must have
been devastating. I mean, it just must
have been I can't imagine the fear. I
can't imagine the feelings. I mean,
like it just must have been truly a
moment he never thought he would live
through. That storm was going to fall
down in my
lifetime. And since this was
July, it could fall down the summer of
1978.
Lameasure needed to decide and decide
fast. But revealing this mistake could
mean lawsuits, bankruptcy, and
professional ruin. He could stay silent.
only Davenport knew and he wouldn't
reveal anything or he could entirely
disappear. In a later interview, he
admitted, "I did say to myself, I could
drive down the main turnpike at 100 mph
and deliberately drive into a bridge
abutment. That would be the end and all
of this would go away." I thought about
that. But there was a 1 in6 chance of
collapse that very fall. With thousands
of lives at risk, there was never any
other choice but to
act. After speaking to a few lawyers and
other engineering experts, Lameasure
told the architect Stubbins, and
together they informed City Corps
chairman, Walter Rriston. Within hours
of that meeting, Lameasure acquired
emergency generators for the tuned mass
damper. The TMD was originally designed
to stabilize any swaying for comfort,
but now it became the crutch that the
tower leaned on. Lameasure pinned all
his hopes on it. He called the
confidential repair plan Project
Pandora, but that sounded ominous. So,
he came up with the special engineering
review of events nobody envisioned, or
project serene for short. Each night,
welders would enter the building after
everyone left, rip off the sheetrock
around the chevron beams, and then weld
two 5-cm thick, 2 m long steel plates on
each joint, like band-aids, literally
band-aids on both sides of these joints.
After they'd replace the wall and clean
everything up before the office workers
came back the next morning, they needed
to weld over 200 joints, and Lameasure
ranked them by importance, starting with
the ones on the 30th floor. But the
repairs wouldn't be completed before
hurricane season. So, City Corp worked
with the Red Cross to develop a 10b
block evacuation plan. Like, how many
people were at risk in the building? And
if it fell, would it affect other
buildings? Like, were there chances of
it leading to something more disastrous?
Absolutely. This would have
toppled and it would have toppled into
another building which would have
toppled into another building which
would have continued a horrific process.
So it was untold um what the ultimate
effects could have been. I mean like
just the evacuation plans were how many
people? Thousands. The building itself
housed thousands and then the residents
and the businesses surrounding the
building. It was into the thousands.
Despite the risk, they decided not to
tell the public or even the office
workers in the building. No one wanted a
mass panic. Instead, they fitted strain
gauges on important structural members.
The gauges monitored the skyscrapers
every bend and twist from a comm center
eight blocks away. At least that would
give them a little bit of warning. But
this plan required new telephone lines
and the phone company wouldn't get
around to doing this for months. So City
Corps chairman immediately called AT&T's
president and the lines were installed
the next morning. Now you might not be
able to install emergency telephone
lines at a whim, but you can still stay
connected no matter what.
[Music]
It's probably not that important. Henry,
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video. And now back to Project
Serene. I mean, should probably take
this. But even though Lameasure tried to
keep Project Serene under wraps, people
started asking questions. On August 8th,
City Corp released a statement about the
repairs. No, we had to cook up a line of
bull, I'll tell you. And white lies at
this point are entirely
moral. You don't want to spread terror
in the community to people that don't
need to be terrorized. We were
terrorized. No question about that.
Several newspapers reported on it, but
they didn't have the details. Then
Lameasure got a message. The New York
Times was trying to reach him. If he
didn't respond, they would know
something was up. So I mixed a martini
for myself and it's 1 minute past 6. I
dialed the New York Times. I pick it up
the phone. They pick up the phone. It's
a tape recorder saying the New York
Times has gone on strike as of 6:00.
Not only did the New York Times go on
strike, but all the newspapers in New
York went on strike until October. So,
we had a press blackout, and that was
the greatest thing that ever
happened. The press was off their back,
and the weather was beautiful. The
repair work continued
smoothly, but late August brought the
news everyone had been dreading.
Hurricane Ella starts brewing in the
Caribbean and this is the one storm that
they're nervous about. The repairs were
halfway done by now. I think it was a
one in 200year storm that it could
withstand but Lameasure wasn't taking
chances cuz he didn't know the intensity
of the storm and this was a strong
storm. So there was there was a chance
there was absolutely a chance and they
had to prepare for that chance.
By Friday, September 1st, Ella was
making her way toward New York with
winds reaching 200
kmh. City officials braced to start the
evacuation. Police would go door to door
to get everyone out within a 10 block
radius. For 24 t hours, Ella stalled
around North Carolina.
Like Lameasure said, we were sweating
blood. But sometime in the night,
Hurricane Ella veered off into the sea
at the last minute. It intensified and
hit Canada with peak winds of 225
kmh. But City Corp was
safe. Lameasure described that next
morning in New York as the most
beautiful day that the world's ever
seen. They completed the repairs in
October, just 6 weeks after Lameasure
told City. Now, the building, according
to Lameasure, can withstand a 1 in1,000
storm. The repairs cost between $4 and
$5 million, but Lameasure argued that
City Corp approved an earlier building
design that cost 5 to6 million more. So,
they were willing to spend that much on
the skyscraper
anyway. And for almost two decades, The
Secret was confined to a small inner
circle. But in 1995, the New Yorker
finally brought Project Serene into the
light. Far from being vilified,
Lameasure was praised for owning up to
his mistake and fixing the issue as soon
as possible. After the article, New York
updated the building code to require
quartering wind calculations. And since
that first damper in City Corp, TMDS
have spread across the globe, allowing
architects to push skyscrapers taller
and slimmer. It's the first tall
building in the world ever built with
mechanical help to make it the structure
work. That's remarkable. Incidentally,
that has been now copied 100 times in
Japan. This is ubiquitous. And when I go
to Japan, I'm treated like a tin god cuz
I'm the father of the tuned mass damper.
I said, really? Of the 20 tallest
buildings in the world, six include a
tuned mass damper. And they're
especially critical in typhoon or
earthquakeprone regions. For example,
Taipei 101 has a massive 660 ton
pendulum that stabilizes the building.
It can withstand up to 200 km perh winds
and earthquakes with magnitudes over
6.8.
But the legacy of this building is still
steeped in controversy. First, who was
the mysterious student that started it
all? I think it was um spring of 1978.
There's a student at Princeton, an under
undergraduate student by the name of
Diane Hartley, and she's studying uh
structural engineering. It was time for
her to consider a senior thesis, and
they decided that a study of the new
City Corp tower would be wonderful. It's
a remarkable thesis. It contains a lot
of the original engineering calculations
by the engineers. She's looking through
the documentation. Where did they
consider quartering winds? and she's not
seeing it. You know, I must be wrong.
She says she's just an undergraduate
student and you guys are awardwinning
structural engineers. The engineer
explains to Diane Hartley, quartering
winds are not a factor in this building.
So, she's satisfied. She graduates.
That's it. Doesn't think about it again.
But a year after the New Yorker article,
the BBC released a documentary on the
crisis. And so she she was holding her
baby and she turned on the television
and lo and behold, she heard them
reference a conversation with a student,
an engineering student from New Jersey
reaching out to Lameasure. And she said,
"I almost dropped my baby." And then so
she just assumed for years afterwards,
she assumed that it wasn't me because I
didn't speak to Lameasure. But then in
2003, her thesis adviser told Diane that
he checked all the other New Jersey
engineering and architecture programs
and no one else was working on a project
about City Corp in 1978. She was the
only one. She never spoke to Lameasure
personally. She never claimed to speak
to Lameasure personally. The assumption
was that either Lameasure was mistaken
and that it was Diane Hartley who made
the call, it was a female, or more
likely that Lameasure was basically
tipped off by his New York engineers.
Then in 2011, a man named Lee Decarolus
came forward and the phone call as we
understand it came from a student at the
New Jersey Institute of Technology. His
name is Lee Dear Carolis. He's not
asking for money. He's not asking for
fame or glory. He's just saying this is
interesting and I'm the guy who made
this call and he said yeah I had a
conversation with Bill Lameasure and he
pretty much lined up with what Lameasure
himself said. Sadly Lameasure passed
away in 2007 before he could confirm the
student's identity.
Believe it or not 40 years later there's
still I learned a lot of raw feeling
still on this. People aren't anxious to
talk about this especially people that
were involved in it. even people that
weren't involved in it but were
tangentially involved in it. We reached
out to the measure associates and they
refused to respond to our request. You
think that they would the the namesake
for their company uh stood up and did
the right thing, but I don't think they
want to be associated with mistakes.
Their project description for City Corp
doesn't even mention the repairs. The
building was sold to Boston Properties
in 2001, who renamed it 601 Lexington.
They also didn't respond to our request
for comment and refused to let us film
inside the
building. Further questions arose in
2021 with a new study from the National
Institute of Standards and Technology.
They wanted to see if quartering winds
were more demanding for a building like
Citycore. Although they did conclude
that the pressure from perpendicular
winds was greater, their analysis didn't
include any internal structure specific
to City Corp. As for Lameasure, the
engineering field still regards his
actions as upstanding. And the city corp
case is taught all over the world as a
case of good engineering ethics. In
fact, in my own engineering ethics
course, I learned about the city court
building. And every structural engineer
experiences this. When you actually feel
the weight of the responsibility, you're
saying based on my engineering, that
building is going to stand up. Nobody
else worries about it. And so if you
think about the emotional pressure that
Bill Lameasure was under and then
needing to come back and do something
about it and to mobilize and to hold
that during this entire process, it's
truly a remarkable story. I mean, I I
can't imagine it. I can't imagine it. I
said, "Look, if you got a license from
the state and a certification for
university first, and now you're going
to use that license to hold yourself out
as a professional, you have a
responsibility beyond yourself. If you
see something that is a social risk,
good heavens, this thing would kill
thousands. You must do something. You
must do something.