[mherdeg]

Wow, the last time I read about this, I had not seen

* the 2019 update that someone re-evaluated the risks and thinks the retrofit might not have been necessary after all ( https://www.nist.gov/publications/wind-effects-tall-building... )

* the identification of the person who called LeMessurier in 1978 and whose questions made him redo the math (whose name is not listed in the New Yorker article) as Lee DeCarolis ( https://onlineethics.org/node/41606 )

In the version of the story I read, Diane Hartley flagged the risk to the engineer by writing a whole thesis about the building (see e.g. writeup at https://www.lemessurier.com/sites/default/files/publications... and https://onlineethics.org/cases/engineers-and-scientists-beha... ).

It's interesting how, the closer you look, reality grows more complex than the stories we tell about it.

[velcrovan]

In 2014, the 99% Invisible podcast did an episode on this story. Not only did they credit Diane Hartley and her thesis, but they interviewed her about it: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/structural-integrity/

[intrasight]

So the New Yorker article is embellished - as it recounts two conversations he had with a "young man" - when it fact it was a young woman and it was one of his associates and not LeMessurier who had those conversations.

edit:Wikipedia says that Lee DeCarolis came forward in 2022 to identify himself as the person who had spoken to LeMessurier. His story is here: https://onlineethics.org/node/41606

[JeremyNT]

Link to said wikipedia story [0], which includes a lot of context and subsequent developments that are missing from the OP.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citicorp_Center_engineering_cr...