Empire State Building Construction

Empire State Building Construction

Introduction

Before going into the details of the project and risk management of such a monumental structure, we must first go through some important facts about this great building. The Empire State Building stands 1250 feet in New York City, United States. It is still the 7th tallest building the world, infact it was the world's tallest building for 41 years until the construction of World Trade center. The design of the building was changes 16 times and it took 41 million dollars, 3000 workers and 1 year 45 days to make this building. The composition of the building is such that it is made up of 60,000 tons of steel, 10 million bricks, 730 tons of aluminum and stainless steel and 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone and granite. It has 86 floors and there are 1575 stairs to reach the top floor.

This report however deals with the risk management of the construction where we will analyze the possible catastrophic failure and risk involved with the help of two Fault Tree diagrams. The fault trees will be discussed in detail later in the report

Discussion on Fault Tree one

Fault tree one deal with the failure of the building due to this collapse. It can be seen from the fault tree above that it needs a combination of vents to make this collapse happen. Considering the magnitude of this building it is not easy for it to collapse but it is important to make such assumptions before construction. If we analyze the structure of this building, it has a stable 3D grid right through the entire structure. However, there are no open spaces because the grid are so closely spaced that there is hardly any space in it. This space scenario is true for all the floors of Empire State Building.

After covering the internal structure, if we analyze the external structure of the building, we will come to know that the source of damage from outside damage could be anything and there are many factor involved in it. The damage can be caused by fire, extreme weather, bomb, or airplane crash. Considering all these factors in mind, the Empire State Building was designed to handle a 225km/h hurricane or even hold up to lateral load of 5000 tons. This designing would enable the Empire State Building to stand up to various external factors even in extreme conditions. While talking about the external factors affecting the building, the internal structure will also support the survival of the building, because the Empire State Building s designed in a way that the load of the lost columns would be covered by the remaining ones.

It has been commonly observed that for buildings like Empire State Building, out of all the external factors, fire is the real danger and it can be seen that in past that building with such structure were only brought down because of fire. The Empire State Building Is designed in a way that it can ...