The retrofit, announced in October following years of lawsuits, hearings and accusations, will finally anchor the building to the bedrock. The piles will then be tied to the existing foundation, he said. “I can state with confidence that settlements experienced by Millennium Tower have not compromised its stability and safety.”Ī $100 million fix, set to be completed next year, involves the installation of piles into the bedrock of downtown San Francisco beneath the building, according to Millennium spokesman Doug Elmets. “Millennium Tower was designed to stringent earthquake resistance standards and is a much tougher form of construction than typical buildings in Florida, which are not required to be designed for earthquake resistance,” he added. “The collapse of the residential building in Surfside … was tragic, but it is far too early to speculate about what caused that disaster - and any potential comparisons with Millennium Tower would be reckless and premature,” Hamburger said. Hamburger, who has monitored the settlements of the Millennium Tower and evaluated their effect on the structure since 2014, told CNN in a statement that the building was designed for earthquake resistance, remains safe and is not at risk of collapse. Millennium engineer: Surfside comparisons ‘reckless and premature’ He represented about 100 Millennium Tower residents who reached a mediated settlement in 2020 with developers and others to a lawsuit claiming their property values plummeted with news of the sinking. “When you have a high rise that collapses and you had a situation in San Francisco - we had a high rise that was sinking and tilting - it affects people’s peace of mind,” said attorney Niall McCarthy. If all goes as planned now, the tower foundation is expected to be extended and supported to bedrock on two sides by this spring.Now, amid reports suggesting the deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers South more than 3,000 miles away in Surfside, Florida, began in the building’s lower reaches, questions are being raised about the Bay Area tower’s structural integrity. Residents NBC Bay Area talked to said they are still coming to grips with the reality that the tower will likely lean forever. “There's a lot of factors that they have not accounted for,” Williams said. He also worries the tower ended up tilting more than the model predicted last year. “There's a lot of uncertainty,” said David Williams, a deep foundation expert who worries that computer analysis doesn’t specifically simulate the factors that triggered the construction related sinking. But some critics fear that the model’s predictions could be overly optimistic. Investigative Reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken, who has been at the forefront of the investigation for years, has some insight.Ĭity-appointed experts are satisfied with the model’s conclusions, Hamburger said in the statement. San Francisco’s Millennium Tower has been sinking and leaning for years and the final phase of the fix is now underway. Recovery of some of the tilt that has already occurred is a secondary benefit, not a primary objective.” Lead fix engineer Ronald Hamburger said in a statement that the primary objectives “have always been to arrest building settlement at the northwest corner … and stop tilting by transferring a portion of the building’s weight to bedrock. ![]() ![]() The model projects that once it is secured, the tower will permanently tilt about two feet at the northwest corner. While the fix was billed as providing some relief, it turns out that the fix engineers’ latest computer model shows the construction project will only offset about 4.5 inches of lean, less than half the roughly ten inches of tilt triggered so far during construction. “If I was a resident, I’d still be worried that I can't put something on the table without it rolling off,” Poulos said. ![]() Both times, the marble quickly ran out of steam and came back toward that northwest corner. Recently, a resident videotaped an experiment to show what the tilt looks like on the inside – twice rolling a marble uphill, toward the center of a unit near the corner of the building leaning the most. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter. Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news.
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