Tourists got a huge fright when a glass sky deck they were standing on at Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) began to crack under their feet.
The enclosed glass box, known as ‘The Ledge’, extends out from the building’s 103rd floor 412 metres above the ground.
Visitor Jesus Pintado said he was waiting to step out of The Ledge when he heard the sound of cracking glass. He told WTHR, ‘I think something fell from the ceiling because I saw like a little metallic piece, like a square, and it was in the middle of the crack of the glass.’
‘I hear a noise like ‘ksh ksh ksh’ and it cracked,’ he went on. ‘[There was] a woman with two little kids and they looked like pale because the whole glass is cracked.’
A spokeswoman for Willis Tower said the guests were never in any danger when this happened, as it was in fact just the protective layer over the glass on the ledge that cracked.
In May 2014 the protective layer on the same sky deck cracked and was replaced just as it has been again after this latest incident.
Chicago’s Willis Tower was the world’s tallest building from 1973 when it was completed until 1998, when Malaysia’s Petronas Towers took the title. Dubai’s Burj Khalifa currently holds the honour.
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