San Francisco's 58-story "leaning tower" is sinking fast

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/24/san-franciscos-58-story-le.html

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On the plus side, if you drop a piece of cutlery at the dinner table, you know which skirting board it is going to slide over to and rest up against …

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On the plus side - great spot for your pendulum installation.

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On the plus side, if all the tenants vacate before it becomes uninhabitable, maybe there’s some new emergency shelter for the homeless.

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Also, a 16-inch sink so far? That sure is a lulu of a first step as you go inside.

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TIM-BURRRRRRR!

huh

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On the plus side, who ever engineered the water, sewer, electrical and telcom connections knew what they were doing.

Maybe its due to earthquake country engineering, but how to you put in over 16" of slack into these connections with the greater grid?

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Completed seven years ago, the tower so far has sunk 16 inches into the soft soil and landfill of San Francisco’s crowded financial district.

That’s especially alarming, since it was constructed several blocks away, in the SoMa.

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Final Photo: What Happens Next is Tragic and Heartbreaking

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You big babies. It’s fine. It isn’t even leaning that far yet.

Call me when it gets to the Italian “I’m not drunk, you’re drunk!” levels of lean.

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you could auto correct with a tilt-shift lens effectous

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Yeah, Pisa was leaning even during construction, so that’s like the pre-drinking at home before the pub crawl.

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a 2-inch tilt at the base—and a roughly 6-inch lean at the top

How can you have a tilt at the base? Tilt is measured in terms of an offset from a fixed point - so what’s the fixed point here?

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I wonder what that does to the property values of the buildings in the potential fall zone.

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It’s San Francisco. They just go up a mere 15% instead of 20%.

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Millennium Partners, who built the tower, insist that everything is fine. Founding partner Chris Jeffries said, "We did this building the right way...The building is 100 percent safe."
Would Millennium Partners care to set up their office on the top floor of this building? That would certainly be a sign of good faith in the safety of the building, and if the company that owns the building is concerned about its investment MP may be able to get a good deal on the space. The same goes for Chris Jeffries living at or near the top of the building.
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Maybe you’re being super-technical, but it seems clear what this means: one side has sunk two inches more than the other.

You can have a tilt at the base if you put your spirit level on the floor in the lobby and the little bubble isn’t in the right place.

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I was actually quite surprised at how small a 6" drop is. It looks like the shorter side of the building is about 100 ft (just looking at Google Maps), so in the worse case, a 6" drop over 1200" is about a 0.3º slope. I wonder if that’s actually noticeable at all within the building.

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“Maybe it’s EVERYBODY ELSE who is leaning in the OTHER direction. Did you ever think of that??”

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Thank you for this. I was wondering why they couldn’t just give the angle measurement of the tilt at the bottom, so one could visualize the situation without looking stuff up and breaking out a triangle and trigonometry as you did.

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