Yes. Think about what happens when you dig a hole in the sand at the beach. Near the surface, you have to worry about sand collapsing into the hole from the sides. But when you get down to where the sand is saturated, it just flows into the hole almost like water. You end up with a watery pool at the bottom of yur hole that is a bigger diameter than the hole above it. From the description, THAT is something like what people think happened when they were drilling the holes for the new piles. Instead of just removing the soil from where they want to put the new pile, the suspicion that in some layers, the soil was flowing into the hole FROM BENEATH THE BUILDING and being removed.
My point is that even if they DO manage to successfully install the new piles down to bedrock, that might not ultimately be enough to render the building safe. And of course this is in an earthquake zone. How much of the safety factor designed in to survive earthquakes has already been used up supporting a building that is tilting? And if they do, in the end, support a proportion of the weight of the building in a way it was not designed for? Add to that the fact that much of the building is supported on soil that is prone to “liquefaction” and is likely to be less solid than usual in an earthquake. Even if they “fix” this, I would not be sufficiently confident that this building could survive an earthquake.
