Anatol Longinow placed a diagram on an overhead projector to show a roomful of colleagues the perimeter wall he designed for the Harold Washington Social Security Center on West Madison. Longinow was speaking at a dinner meeting of structural engineers on the topic “Designing to Resist Terrorist Attacks.”
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One man stood out from the crowd. He was wearing a zip-up sweatshirt over a dress shirt and tie and drinking through a straw from a Styrofoam cup. His name tag said Robert Johnson, and within minutes of my arrival he was stuffing flyers for upcoming events into my hands and ushering me around the room to meet his colleagues. He couldn’t have been happier to see a reporter. “We refer to ourselves as the stealth profession,” he told me. “Nobody knows who we are until something goes wrong. Then it’s ‘Who did that?’”
Hague pointed out that when Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel remained standing after the 1923 earthquake devastated Tokyo, “everyone said that’s because Frank Lloyd Wright is a great architect.” Clearly exasperated, he continued: “It was his structural engineer!”
Longinow talked about countermeasures, such as “deception.” At a military facility, for example, “you can have an entrance that looks like an entrance that is [really] a blank wall.” At a bank, you could back windows with masonry that doesn’t show from the outside.
Structural engineers in Chicago typically design for 85- to 100-mile-an-hour wind loads and think in pounds per square foot, not pounds per square inch, so Longinow did a quick calculation for the group. “If we compute the pressure in 100-mile-per-hour wind, it’s going to be approximately 63 psf, which is .43 psi,” he said. “If you want to know the distance at which [a weapon equivalent to 4,000 pounds of TNT] will give you .43 psi, it’s 1,372 feet. So you can sort of visualize, if you want your facility to be safe, you have to be approximately 1,400 feet away from the point of the explosion.”
