Insults fly, and Hamburger insists the sinking Millennium Tower is 'stable and safe'

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Originally published at: Insults fly, and Hamburger insists the sinking Millennium Tower is 'stable and safe' | Boing Boing

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So do people actually live in those apartments or are they just a money laundering scheme? Maybe they could just replace the building with NFTs?

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Pyke and Hamburger:

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Love how Hamburger blames the issue on “Media Coverage”.

If a large building falls over in a big city and it makes the “news”, obviously it is the Media’s Fault for making it a big deal. This kind of stuff happens all the time and no one ever cares.

Now if a large building falls over in a big city and it does NOT make the “news”, it is also the Media’s Fault for not investigating this situation and bringing it to the public’s attention so it could have been rectified before it was too late.

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What do you expect when you hire this guy to be your chief engineer?

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Wow, Hamburger flips out. If it’s so safe, why not set the engineers up with an apartment, and BTW notice none of the responsible parties to this hot mess live in the building or anywheres near it.

I wonder why?

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Hate it when the eggs slide to one side of the pan. :confused:

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Never buy a home, or take out a mortgage from a person that doesn’t have one of their own. LPT.

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I think this has been the party line all along but I only recall it in PR statements and not someone offering it to the news as an attempt at “not the droids you are looking for”

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Regardless of the details of this particular sordid saga; is anyone else horrified by the apparent existence of an engineer who states that unanticipated behavior in a safety-critical component is a media/reputation problem?

Aside from being somewhere between ‘cavalier’ and ‘depraved indifference’; on grounds of epistemological purity it seems that such an entity ought to be anathema. Let the PR flacks consider all matters to be of opinion and ultimately flexible; and the finance bros all matters to be spreadsheet operations that are technically legal; but please keep the engineers to being serious about the behavior of their systems.

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You may recall, that my Dear Wife and I this past Summer visited the building as we made our way through the city. This is one of those things you need to really witness yourself. The Westward pitch / angle is impossible at this point to camouflage or explain away. Now we enter the true bullshit stage of this debacle, and the “oh it ain’t that bad” experts will come out’a the woodwork to grab some of that cash, as seen this week, it will only advance all the more as the inevitable sinks in that this building will need to be dismantled at great cost to SF tax payers.

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Erroneous reports? You mean the Millennium Tower hasn’t tilted by 14 inches? It hasn’t sunk over 17 inches? That other engineers studied the asymmetrical foundation repair plans and haven’t concluded they would be completely ineffective and were an irresponsible approach in an earthquake zone? The owners aren’t trying to sell their units, but can’t find buyers?

Exactly which of those reports isn’t true, Chief Engineer Hamburger?

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I’m pretty sure the Millennium Tower is now being held stable by the size of Mr. Hamburger’s ego.

I’ve met humble engineers who will tell you how it is, and I’ve met ones that think their own shit doesn’t stink. I’m not saying Mr. Pyke is an angel, this isn’t his project so it’s easy to criticize, but any good engineer should be able to work with the facts at hand. (The cracking in the sub-basement areas alone would be enough for me to never set foot in that building and my engineering degree isn’t even in that field).

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Ronald Hamburger, in a world of Jen Psakis, you are a Peter Doocy.

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I am gobsmacked that someone would voluntarily go through life with the name Ronald Hamburger.

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True, Robert Hamburger is a much cooler name.

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Roberto Hamborguesa

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Live website with angle of lean of the Millennium Tower versus time plus Ads: moola. Couple of laser pointers across the street and rotating mirrors (plus raspberry-pi), maybe?

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Horrified but not surprised. Like the Morton Thiokol engineer involved in the Challenger disaster, Hamburger has chosen to accept the developer’s advice to “take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat”. This is likely in anticipation of his eventually putting on his “well-paid expert witness hat” when the inevitable lawsuit is filed by the HOA and/or the city for cleaning up this mess.

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