From casement to basement.
Unlucky Number
There’s a heat wave scourging the United States right now, and its latest victim is a big one: a skyscraper.
The Boston Globe reports that a window pane on none other than the cursed 13th floor of a 31-story high-rise shattered due to the extreme temperatures, raining shards of glass onto the sidewalk below.
The good news? No one was hurt — but it could’ve easily played out worse, and joins other reports of buildings reaching their limits under the extreme heat.
Shattered Glass
According to a report by the local police viewed by the Globe, an officer responded to a report of a “hazardous condition” at The Hub, a mixed-use tower that looms above the TD Garden arena in Boston’s West End.
The property manager told the police they heard a “popping” sound when they were inside, and found that the outer window pane had shattered.
Verizon employees who worked at the building said the shattered glass fell onto the sidewalk. The police report notes that these workers went out of their way to cordon off the area where the glass had landed, so: kudos to you, Verizon guys.
It’s unclear if anyone actually witnessed the moment the window gave out, but a building inspector told the police that the extreme heat was the likely cause of the accident. That Monday, temperatures reached 95 degrees, according to AccuWeather — making the weather a pretty plausible culprit.
Staying Cool
Though they may be towering symbols of humankind’s industriousness, skyscrapers may be less than ideal in our ever hotter age.
These monoliths of glass, steel, and concrete are notoriously difficult to keep cool, since their construction essentially resembles a vertical greenhouse, trapping much of heat that gets dispersed over the city.
In rarer, more unfortunate cases where designers didn’t fully think things through, their huge faces of glimmering glass can even reflect the Sun’s blistering rays back onto the streets below — like in the extreme example of the “Walkie-Talkie” skyscraper in London, which became infamous for literally melting a nearby car.
To be fair to skyscrapers, though, they’re not the only buildings feeling the heat right now. A swing bridge in New York City last week got stuck open after extreme temperatures caused the steel to significantly expand — another abrupt reminder that everything under the Sun is threatened by warming.
More on extreme heat: Dozens of Americans Die in Brutal Heat Wave
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