60 Wall Street (JP Morgan building) air conditioning riser pipe failure

Rush erection of a 40-story building with 16-inch air conditioning riser pipes welded in place by welders hanging off I-beams with no inspector access. Welds passed visual inspection from outside but had no penetration past about a quarter inch. Ten years later, JP Morgan spent $7M to relocate an air conditioning compressor to the 10th-floor ledge to protect the 7th-floor trading computers (which could lose ~$1B/minute), and $20M+ more to repair the riser pipe — a $100K inspection problem turned into a $60M+ lawsuit. Used to anchor the "you only get what you pay for" principle.

This comes up all the time. I'll give you an example: 60 Wall Street. 60 Wall Street is a forty-story building in New York City — it's JP Morgan's building. On the seventh floor they have their computers for stock-market trading. If they lose those computers, they can start losing one or two billion dollars a minute, because of the small changes in price on huge sums of money. If your computer can't keep up with everybody else's, you're not going to be able to do your trades and swaps. Nowadays we're getting down into milliseconds of interest.