Posted on 10/24/2016 1:32:26 PM PDT by LRoggy
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Pamela Buttery noticed something peculiar six years ago while practicing golf putting in her 57th-floor apartment at the luxurious Millennium Tower. The ball kept veering to the same corner of her living room.
Those were the first signs for residents of the sleek, mirrored high-rise that something was wrong.
The 58-story building has gained notoriety in recent weeks as the "leaning tower of San Francisco." But it's not just leaning. It's sinking, too. And engineers hired to assess the problem say it shows no immediate sign of stopping.
"What concerns me most is the tilting," says Buttery, 76, a retired real estate developer. "Is it safe to stay here? For how long?"
Completed seven years ago, the tower so far has sunk 16 inches into the soft soil and landfill of San Francisco's crowded financial district. But it's not sinking evenly, which has created a 2-inch tilt at the base - and a roughly 6-inch lean at the top.
By comparison, Italy's famed Leaning Tower of Pisa is leaning more than 16 feet. But in a major earthquake fault zone, the Millennium Tower's structural problems have raised alarm and become the focus of a public scandal.
Several documents involving the downtown building were leaked in recent weeks, including exchanges between the city's Department of Building Inspection and Millennium Partners, the developer. They show both sides knew the building was sinking more than anticipated before it opened in late 2009, but neither made that information public.
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
All the smart, old money built on the side of the hill in SF. No problems with Earthquakes, flood, sinking (or in the old days, disease).
Good one.
And it’s up the hill a bit - anchored to the rock. :)
Faulty Towers?
When radio and TV towers are erected they must own all the land around it so if they fall they don’t fall off the site.
So a 600 foot tower must have a parcel that is 1200 feet square at a minimum.
Why don’t they use these same regulations on high rises ???
58 stories is about 600 feet high. That’s area is about 16 city blocks.
-PJ
Back in the 1990s, I worked in a skyscraper a couple blocks away at the Embarcadero wharf, and had an office looking across the bay towards the Bay Bridge. The City sold some land next to us, and I watched as a developer built a hotel. Noisy as heck for a long time as they drove piles into the ground, and very deep. Not only that, but they then drove steel piles at angles around every vertical pile, perhaps seven angled for each vertical pile at the basement level, and these were all welded together with brackets. They made sure that building would not sink. And it was a seven-story hotel. That leaning Millennium Tower is 58 stories in height.
It's well known that much of this land is former bay, filled in with sediment, shipwrecks and garbage from the 1800s. The original bay shore actually extended many blocks inland. So driving piles to bedrock should be mandatory (but isn't).
Can you spell lawsuits?
And star of "The Towering Inferno" movie.
"Yes, well, of course, this is just the sort blinkered philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome, spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss about the struggling artist.
YOU EXCREMENT! YOU LOUSY HYPOCRITICAL WHINING TOADIES WITH YOUR LOUSY COLOUR TV SETS AND YOUR TONY JACKLIN GOLF CLUBS AND YOUR BLEEDING MASONIC HANDSHAKES! YOU WOULDN'T LET ME JOIN, WOULD YOU YOU BLACKBALLING BASTARDS! WELL I WOULDN'T BECOME A FREEMASON NOW IF YOU WENT DOWN ON YOUR LOUSY, STINKING PRURIENT KNEES AND BEGGED ME!"
I think the Chicoms know a thing or two about new buildings falling over.
Kind of a metaphor for the city of San Francisco.
They don’t use those regulations for high-rise buildings because buildings don’t topple over like a radio or TV antenna might. If a tall building collapses, almost every piece of it falls straight down. See the collapse of the WTC buildings on 9/11, for example. Other than dust that can get carried by the wind, notice how little debris there was outside a small radius at Ground Zero.
Perhaps this was deliberately intended as an homage to Bill Clinton. Peyronie’s Tower?
ROFL
THIS THREAD ROCKS!!!
Chicaps would be the buyers and they weren’t born yesterday
Fits quite well and is illustrative of the “bedrock principles” of the SF governing types...
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