It’s the Leaning Tower of San Francisco.
The Bay Area’s Millennium Tower has only continued to tilt further and sink further west despite the architects’ best efforts to stabilize the luxurious building.
The multimillion-dollar-per-unit tower now leans more than 29 inches at the corner of Fremont and Mission streets — a lean more than half an inch deeper than previously revealed, according to surveillance data reviewed by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit.
The half-inch tilt would have been gained as engineers dug under the sinking condominium earlier this year to support the weight of the tower – which was built on top of a former landfill – along on both sides.
Fix engineers have seen progress in stabilizing the north side of the Millennium Tower along Mission Street after placing six concrete-filled steel piles along its base in January, but that may have had a a cost for the west side of the tower, depending on the data.
Roof-based monitoring data – which is based on roof-based measurements and foundation-based determinations – indicates that the tower has moved nearly an inch west from its forward tilt to be supported on the north side.
The engineers in charge say the data may not be reliable, despite being presented as proof of success earlier in the first phase of the project.
Project engineer Ron Hamburger told NBC in a statement that the rooftop figures are subject to weather fluctuations and said purely foundation-based data is more reliable.
Figures based on the foundations also show the tower leaning further west than ever before, but only about a quarter of an inch – a skinny Hamburger said it was “negligible”.
“We are fully confident that after the remaining design load is transferred to the piles,” Hamburger said, adding that “there will be no further movement of the roof to the west.”
Hamburger and his team then plan to secure the foundations to the dozen sunken piles along Fremont Street that will bear the partial weight of the building’s load.
Each pile is 24 inches in diameter and has been driven 270 feet to bedrock and is designed to support 1 million pounds of weight, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Engineers hope to reverse the tilt – which was revealed to residents in 2016 – by the end of the month.
