9 ms·

Repairs of leaning San Francisco skyscraper on hold

126 points by woofyman 5y ago

redis_mlc 5y ago
Sounds like band-aids don't work on skyscrapers? lol.
HenryKissinger 5y ago
The Millenium Tower needs to be scrapped. It's a failed project. It will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to "fix", and no fix will work in the long term, because the problems are structural. Cut yout losses. Demolish the whole thing.
- mslate 5y ago
  What’s your expertise on this subject beyond armchair quarterbacking?
  - coding123 5y ago
    I'm guessing the Miami building as a lesson.
    - mslate 5y ago
      I personally wouldn’t consider someone’s awareness of another building’s collapse to be expertise, but hey it’s the internet
  - kmbfjr 5y ago
    Your qualifications first.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    What is anyone's expertise on a web forum? If he claimed any, what weight would that add when almost everyone here is anonymous?
    - john_yaya 5y ago
      I can assure you, as the world’s leading behavioral psychologist, a former Miss Universe, and the winner of last year’s Eurovision contest, that the poster is totally qualified to speak on the topic.
- imtringued 5y ago
  I think you are right. It was built to fail after all.
WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
On paper, people who bought those units, own multi million $$$ apartments, but what's their market value, zero? Who would ever buy an apartment in that building? Wouldn't be better to tear it down?
- daniel-thompson 5y ago
  You couldn't pay me to live in, visit, or even walk by that building, but apparently there is a market for the units: - at least 6 units have sold within the past 6 months: https://www.sanfranciscocondomania.com/soldCondos/MILLENNIUM-TOWER-SAN-FRANCISCO.php https://www.sanfranciscocondomania.com/soldCondos/MILLENNIUM... - at least 8 units are currently on the market: https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/millennium-tower_att/ https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/millennium-tower_att...
  - throwthere 5y ago
    I wonder how the $/sq ft compares to similar but structurally sound condo buildings in the area.
    - dehrmann 5y ago
      I assume 1 Rincon Hill is very sound.
  - coding123 5y ago
    One of them actually sold AFTER the Miami collapse. I would think that after seeing the hubris fail elsewhere it would make people second guess a huge purchase like that. It was probably a long escrow and figured they should just close anyway - it won't happen to me, not in this leaning tower in a quake prone area.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > One of them actually sold AFTER the Miami collapse. Why would the collapse of a different building, across the country, for unrelated reasons, affect their decision?
pm90 5y ago
I hope this doesn’t chill demand for residential skyscrapers in SF. It seems like this building is (arguably justifiably) getting a lot of attention but there are multiple ongoing and completed projects that are a good solution to alleviate the housing crisis. Yes they’re all “luxury” condos but they’re satisfying some demand at least.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Towers are I guess the worst and least convenient way to alleviate housing crisis. Raising a few of the city’s hundreds of thousands of detached single-family houses to 2-to-7-story apartment houses would be a lot better, cheaper, faster, and easier.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> “You never place piles or piers closer than three pier diameters apart. These are 36 feet so they should be nine feet apart and they’re, what? — five feet or something. I don’t get this - the piers are 36 feet (engineers using feet?!) in diameter so should be 9 feet apart, but that’s not 3x 36. What do they mean?
- woofyman 5y ago
  It’s a typo. They’re 3 feet in diameter.
- chiragmed 5y ago
  They meant 36 inches.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Wow. Maybe that’s why it’s falling down. Why aren’t engineers using metric?
    - titzer 5y ago
      America. I had to mentally switch to metric when I moved to Europe and now I have to switch back. Ugh.
    - hollerith 5y ago
      Arithmetic continues to work even if you don't use metric units.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        The arithmetic doesn’t work though - that was my point.
        Johnny555 5y ago
        The arithmetic works, but the units were wrong, that can happen in the metric system too.
rsync 5y ago
Building (and seismic) codes in California are stringent, but not in the way many people think. I was surprised to learn that the codes and engineering requirements are specified strictly to avoid loss of life. The buildings themselves are not required to survive in habitable fashion. I was surprised to learn this and it disturbs me to consider that while a major earthquake in the SFBA might be (relatively) free of fatalities, an enormous portion of the built infrastructure would need to be demolished and rebuilt: "The code also does not specify that a building be fit for occupancy after an earthquake. Many buildings might not collapse completely, but they could be damaged beyond repair. The interior walls, the plumbing, elevators — all could be wrecked or damaged."[1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-francisco-earthquake-seismic-gamble.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-franci...
- telesilla 5y ago
  >The buildings themselves are not required to survive in habitable fashion This is the norm for the pacific rim. It's just not economically viable to build for longevity in the face of tectonic movement. Saving lives however? We know how and those cities and citizens at risk that don't invest pay terribly for it. Given what we know about quakes these days, it's inexcusable any civil infrastructure or building should lead to loss of life.
  - titzer 5y ago
    > It's just not economically viable Is that code for "it costs too much"?
    - CryptoBanker 5y ago
      That’s literally what it says. It’s not code for anything
      - irrational 5y ago
        It’s interesting to see what some people consider to be big complicated words.
xenadu02 5y ago
The building was leaning 17" at the top when this work started. Within a year it is now leaning 22". That is a dramatic increase in such a short time. It would appear the objections to the original plan were sound. The alternative proposal is to drill through the original foundation to set the piers from inside the building. My understanding is this would be more evenly distributed and attached to the original foundation evenly. Then jacks would be used to "climb" the piers to level the building - very slowly over time. The original fix is cheaper because it relies on gravity to further sink the high corner of the building once the lower side is fixed in place by the piers, then once that has happened piers can be sunk on that side. It also spreads the cost out over a longer period of time. The other objection to the original fix is seismic: if only one corner is resting on bedrock during an earthquake the building could be severely damaged.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  How do you drive piles once the building is completed? Do you go to the basement (probably a parking garage), open up space with the floor above it, and drive short segments that are welded together? I thing one of the earlier plans was to do this all outside the building on the perimeter, but if that's not enough, it sounds really complicated.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    They should put a big hydraulic shaker in the bottom of the garage and just shake it until it hits solid ground. Then punch a new door in on whatever floor happens to be at grade.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      They'd have to reinforce all the walls first.
    - kaikai 5y ago
      The bedrock is over 100ft down, so that would be fun
xyzzy21 5y ago
I find everything about this building hilarious in a dark, horrifying engineering and bureaucratic sense. Part of what started this: a NYC architect and NYC construction contractor came to SF for the first time in their corporate and professional experiences and decided to build a building, cutting corners on standard local construction standards, regulations and laws because they found loopholes in all three and they thought it would save a lot of money. So they did NOT do any of the standard "ground work" (sic) to prepare the foundation as every other skyscraper in SF and California normally does. The normal process is to drive piles down to bedrock. They didn't do this. They put piles into sand. SF is primarily all sand sitting atop of deeper rocks but some of that rock is very deep below the surface. In that particular area, the rock is quite deep (all the hills you see like Nob Hill, Coit Tower, etc. are the rocky high spots surrounded by deep valleys covered with sand from ancient water inlets). Local construction companies know all about this geophysical reality. Apparently these NYC companies did not and had zero engineering/professional intuition about the nature of earthquakes and construction in California. Because of this the building started to both sink and tilt. And honestly, ANYTHING short of tearing the building down and starting again is at best a bandaid fix that may or may not work for long. This is a legendary FU. And you are seeing these New Yorkers trying to lawyer their way out of the liability they will inevitably face by doing things on-the-cheap and half-assed. Here they got caught doing just that! My late father was a big name in construction in the SF Bay Area. He was involved with most skyscrapers built in SF from 1970-1985 which includes the WF tower, Hyatt-Regency, Embarcadero Center building complex, etc. At that time I was a kid and he'd "take me to work" at these sites while under construction and I got to talk to construction workers, structural engineers, etc. about how it was done. It fascinated me enough to go into engineering professionally though the later PC and semiconductor revolution of the 1970s drove me to an EE degree instead of ME/CivE.
- diebeforei485 5y ago
  > The normal process is to drive piles down to bedrock. Citation needed. Friction piles are quite normal too. I've lived in buildings in SoMa that used friction piles and none of them were tilting as much as this building. There's something more going on here (design or construction flaws), but it isn't as simple as "friction piles bad". https://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/15/12930402/millennium-towner-sinking-foundation-buildings https://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/15/12930402/millennium-towner-s...
jbaudanza 5y ago
So, is this thing going to fall over and kill everyone or what? Someone with engineering experience, please explain why this is hyperbolic and downvote me away. I don't know anything about construction. But I do know that bureaucrats love to kick the can down the road, rather than deal with things directly. In this case, that would mean forcing some of San Francisco's wealthiest, and most-influential to demolish their luxury homes.

126 points by woofyman 5y ago

Sounds like band-aids don't work on skyscrapers? lol.

The Millenium Tower needs to be scrapped. It's a failed project. It will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to "fix", and no fix will work in the long term, because the problems are structural. Cut yout losses. Demolish the whole thing.

mslate 5y ago
What’s your expertise on this subject beyond armchair quarterbacking?
- coding123 5y ago
  I'm guessing the Miami building as a lesson.
  - mslate 5y ago
    I personally wouldn’t consider someone’s awareness of another building’s collapse to be expertise, but hey it’s the internet
- kmbfjr 5y ago
  Your qualifications first.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  What is anyone's expertise on a web forum? If he claimed any, what weight would that add when almost everyone here is anonymous?
  - john_yaya 5y ago
    I can assure you, as the world’s leading behavioral psychologist, a former Miss Universe, and the winner of last year’s Eurovision contest, that the poster is totally qualified to speak on the topic.
imtringued 5y ago
I think you are right. It was built to fail after all.

WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago

On paper, people who bought those units, own multi million $$$ apartments, but what's their market value, zero? Who would ever buy an apartment in that building? Wouldn't be better to tear it down?

daniel-thompson 5y ago
You couldn't pay me to live in, visit, or even walk by that building, but apparently there is a market for the units: - at least 6 units have sold within the past 6 months: https://www.sanfranciscocondomania.com/soldCondos/MILLENNIUM-TOWER-SAN-FRANCISCO.php https://www.sanfranciscocondomania.com/soldCondos/MILLENNIUM... - at least 8 units are currently on the market: https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/millennium-tower_att/ https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/millennium-tower_att...
- throwthere 5y ago
  I wonder how the $/sq ft compares to similar but structurally sound condo buildings in the area.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    I assume 1 Rincon Hill is very sound.
- coding123 5y ago
  One of them actually sold AFTER the Miami collapse. I would think that after seeing the hubris fail elsewhere it would make people second guess a huge purchase like that. It was probably a long escrow and figured they should just close anyway - it won't happen to me, not in this leaning tower in a quake prone area.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > One of them actually sold AFTER the Miami collapse. Why would the collapse of a different building, across the country, for unrelated reasons, affect their decision?

pm90 5y ago

I hope this doesn’t chill demand for residential skyscrapers in SF. It seems like this building is (arguably justifiably) getting a lot of attention but there are multiple ongoing and completed projects that are a good solution to alleviate the housing crisis. Yes they’re all “luxury” condos but they’re satisfying some demand at least.

jeffbee 5y ago
Towers are I guess the worst and least convenient way to alleviate housing crisis. Raising a few of the city’s hundreds of thousands of detached single-family houses to 2-to-7-story apartment houses would be a lot better, cheaper, faster, and easier.

chrisseaton 5y ago

> “You never place piles or piers closer than three pier diameters apart. These are 36 feet so they should be nine feet apart and they’re, what? — five feet or something. I don’t get this - the piers are 36 feet (engineers using feet?!) in diameter so should be 9 feet apart, but that’s not 3x 36. What do they mean?

woofyman 5y ago
It’s a typo. They’re 3 feet in diameter.
chiragmed 5y ago
They meant 36 inches.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Wow. Maybe that’s why it’s falling down. Why aren’t engineers using metric?
  - titzer 5y ago
    America. I had to mentally switch to metric when I moved to Europe and now I have to switch back. Ugh.
  - hollerith 5y ago
    Arithmetic continues to work even if you don't use metric units.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      The arithmetic doesn’t work though - that was my point.
      - Johnny555 5y ago
        The arithmetic works, but the units were wrong, that can happen in the metric system too.

rsync 5y ago

Building (and seismic) codes in California are stringent, but not in the way many people think. I was surprised to learn that the codes and engineering requirements are specified strictly to avoid loss of life. The buildings themselves are not required to survive in habitable fashion. I was surprised to learn this and it disturbs me to consider that while a major earthquake in the SFBA might be (relatively) free of fatalities, an enormous portion of the built infrastructure would need to be demolished and rebuilt: "The code also does not specify that a building be fit for occupancy after an earthquake. Many buildings might not collapse completely, but they could be damaged beyond repair. The interior walls, the plumbing, elevators — all could be wrecked or damaged."[1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-francisco-earthquake-seismic-gamble.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-franci...

telesilla 5y ago
>The buildings themselves are not required to survive in habitable fashion This is the norm for the pacific rim. It's just not economically viable to build for longevity in the face of tectonic movement. Saving lives however? We know how and those cities and citizens at risk that don't invest pay terribly for it. Given what we know about quakes these days, it's inexcusable any civil infrastructure or building should lead to loss of life.
- titzer 5y ago
  > It's just not economically viable Is that code for "it costs too much"?
  - CryptoBanker 5y ago
    That’s literally what it says. It’s not code for anything
    - irrational 5y ago
      It’s interesting to see what some people consider to be big complicated words.

xenadu02 5y ago

The building was leaning 17" at the top when this work started. Within a year it is now leaning 22". That is a dramatic increase in such a short time. It would appear the objections to the original plan were sound. The alternative proposal is to drill through the original foundation to set the piers from inside the building. My understanding is this would be more evenly distributed and attached to the original foundation evenly. Then jacks would be used to "climb" the piers to level the building - very slowly over time. The original fix is cheaper because it relies on gravity to further sink the high corner of the building once the lower side is fixed in place by the piers, then once that has happened piers can be sunk on that side. It also spreads the cost out over a longer period of time. The other objection to the original fix is seismic: if only one corner is resting on bedrock during an earthquake the building could be severely damaged.

dehrmann 5y ago
How do you drive piles once the building is completed? Do you go to the basement (probably a parking garage), open up space with the floor above it, and drive short segments that are welded together? I thing one of the earlier plans was to do this all outside the building on the perimeter, but if that's not enough, it sounds really complicated.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  They should put a big hydraulic shaker in the bottom of the garage and just shake it until it hits solid ground. Then punch a new door in on whatever floor happens to be at grade.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    They'd have to reinforce all the walls first.
  - kaikai 5y ago
    The bedrock is over 100ft down, so that would be fun

xyzzy21 5y ago

I find everything about this building hilarious in a dark, horrifying engineering and bureaucratic sense. Part of what started this: a NYC architect and NYC construction contractor came to SF for the first time in their corporate and professional experiences and decided to build a building, cutting corners on standard local construction standards, regulations and laws because they found loopholes in all three and they thought it would save a lot of money. So they did NOT do any of the standard "ground work" (sic) to prepare the foundation as every other skyscraper in SF and California normally does. The normal process is to drive piles down to bedrock. They didn't do this. They put piles into sand. SF is primarily all sand sitting atop of deeper rocks but some of that rock is very deep below the surface. In that particular area, the rock is quite deep (all the hills you see like Nob Hill, Coit Tower, etc. are the rocky high spots surrounded by deep valleys covered with sand from ancient water inlets). Local construction companies know all about this geophysical reality. Apparently these NYC companies did not and had zero engineering/professional intuition about the nature of earthquakes and construction in California. Because of this the building started to both sink and tilt. And honestly, ANYTHING short of tearing the building down and starting again is at best a bandaid fix that may or may not work for long. This is a legendary FU. And you are seeing these New Yorkers trying to lawyer their way out of the liability they will inevitably face by doing things on-the-cheap and half-assed. Here they got caught doing just that! My late father was a big name in construction in the SF Bay Area. He was involved with most skyscrapers built in SF from 1970-1985 which includes the WF tower, Hyatt-Regency, Embarcadero Center building complex, etc. At that time I was a kid and he'd "take me to work" at these sites while under construction and I got to talk to construction workers, structural engineers, etc. about how it was done. It fascinated me enough to go into engineering professionally though the later PC and semiconductor revolution of the 1970s drove me to an EE degree instead of ME/CivE.

diebeforei485 5y ago
> The normal process is to drive piles down to bedrock. Citation needed. Friction piles are quite normal too. I've lived in buildings in SoMa that used friction piles and none of them were tilting as much as this building. There's something more going on here (design or construction flaws), but it isn't as simple as "friction piles bad". https://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/15/12930402/millennium-towner-sinking-foundation-buildings https://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/15/12930402/millennium-towner-s...

jbaudanza 5y ago

So, is this thing going to fall over and kill everyone or what? Someone with engineering experience, please explain why this is hyperbolic and downvote me away. I don't know anything about construction. But I do know that bureaucrats love to kick the can down the road, rather than deal with things directly. In this case, that would mean forcing some of San Francisco's wealthiest, and most-influential to demolish their luxury homes.