![]() ![]() To suggest that this is caused by anything other than the adjacent construction is a red herring.” Stephen DeSimone, president and CEO of DeSimone, counters that “buildings for decades have been founded on this Colma layer. “Millennium Partners’ poor design decision is the cause of the tilt and excessive vertical settlement of the Millennium Tower,” Boule says. He points out that the Salesforce and 181 Fremont towers-also adjacent to the Transit Center-are supported on piles drilled to bedrock. That foundation is inadequate to prevent settlement of a building with the weight of the Tower.” This heavy structure rests on layers of soft, compressible soil. He says the Millennium Tower “is made of concrete rather than steel, resulting in a very heavy building. It remains to be seen when the foundation-shoring project will resume.In a prepared statement, TJPA legislative-affairs and community-outreach manager Scott Boule says the design was paired with a concrete slab foundation that doesn’t reach bedrock 200 ft deep. He also says, "It’s very risky playing around with something that’s as complex as this structure’s foundation and not understanding what’s happening," adding that "excessive damage" to the tower could result from more rapid sinking at this stage. ![]() "The trend is the thing that’s very disturbing, the fact that they have reactivated settlement,” he tells the station, adding that the speed of the new sinking is of special concern." "I can state with confidence that settlements experienced by Millennium Tower have not compromised its stability and safety."īut an outside expert, Oakland-based structural engineer David Williams, tells NBC Bay Area that the new data on accelerating sinking is not nothing. "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," Hamburger said. But Millennium Tower head engineer Ronald Hamburger told CNN in July that there shouldn't be cause for any comparisons. ![]() Nervousness about the tower's ongoing troubles was heightened following the June collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, which brought issues of structural integrity into the national spotlight. "There has been no material harm to the building, and it remains fully safe,” says the Millennium Tower Association in a letter to residents about the temporary construction pause. That translates to an extra five inches of tilt at the top, for a total of 22 inches in the direction of Fremont and Mission streets. Drilling for the new piles began in May, and in June, engineers reportedly found accelerated sinking and tilting, which now amounts to a full inch of sink since the work began. But the developer pointed fingers back at the next-door Transbay Transit Center's construction, saying that "de-watering" of the soil for that project led to increased "settlement" for the Millennium Tower.įast-forward through a frenzy of local and national media coverage and a bunch of lawsuits, and a $100 million fix was landed upon in which new pilings would be drilled down to bedrock, and the existing foundation of Millennium Tower attached to those, to stop the sinking and, eventually, fix the tilt.īut as NBC Bay Area reports, residents were informed recently that the project has temporarily stopped out of "an abundance of caution" because the building appears to have sunk more rapidly than it had been in just a few months. One cause, as engineers quickly surmised, was the fact that the developers had failed to drill pilings down to bedrock for the foundation - something that the nearby Salesforce Tower has. The saga of the 58-story tower becoming the "Leaning Tower of San Francisco" dates back five years, to August 2016, when the first report arrived that the high-rise - home to the likes of Joe Montana and Hunter Pence - had sunk over sixteen inches in the eight years since construction began. The ongoing project to shore up the foundation of the sinking and tilting Millennium Tower in downtown SF is temporarily on hold as engineers examine some newly accelerated sinking and tilting of the building. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |