SF Millennium Tower Is Unsalvageable, Will Have To Come Down (2023 Update)

The consulting engineering firm is based in NYC, and was also the firm on another troubled property:

Fred Bloggs snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Number 5 needs to be disassembled. :-)

That would be the most expensive top-down floor by floor demolition ever undertaken. A historic set of events.

Though looks like the firm they're scrutinizing is one is Treadwell & Rollo who worked on the foundation design, slab-on-pile doesn't seem unusual for the area so where did they f*ck up

Fred Bloggs snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Barely a dozen years and already failing structurally. Time to run away! That clock is ticking too fast for me.

I thought they always drove piles down to bedrock when building on fill but looks like in this case maybe they didn't? They drove them down to "dense sand" sounds like it wasn't dense enough perhaps

I heard a bit of reporting that the original design was for more steel than concrete, but somehow changed to more concrete (for cost reason?). The foundation cannot support the weight. They would have to keep the building empty, which is not really a problem. There are plenty of partially empty building in the area anyway.

Worse than dropouts: architects.

No loss. The building is really ugly.

bitrex snipped-for-privacy@example.net wrote in news:Y_VfJ.7492$ snipped-for-privacy@fx07.iad:

Not as dense as I or it would have held up.

There was an urban legend among students at UMass (had a friend or two who went there in the 90s) that the library there wasn't designed to support the weight of the books, not true but amusing campus-story:

It did have a settling problem I think which was resolved. Spalling was also a problem. Nice views from the top as it's one of the tallest buildings in western MA but UMass has a ton of land and it's IMO an ugly-ass structure (type that seemed to be in fashion with US universities at the time), always wondered why they bothered building a "skyscraper" there.

Nope- their experimental pier was about 100 ft shy of bedrock. It was supposed to spread like a "broom" at depth making the sand/ loose fill a sufficient support. Anyone could see that these crummy "brooms" would not settle uniformly, except in a crummy CAD system, and any imbalance would be self-amplifying- mainly because structures tilt. Absolute stupidity to approve something experimental like this in a project of this size and high density location. Anything that doesn't have a track record of success in a specific region, is experimental there. Just because something worked spectacularly well in Europe or China, doesn't mean it's going to work well in SF.

Half of downtown Boston is built on shit-fill; John Hancock tower is of similar height and when they built it they drove the piles down to bedrock, the problem with that job IIRC was the fill was of such a heavy sludge-like consistency the coffer dam walls kept caving in on the construction crews while they were trying to bang the piles in.

You know that foundation has to be full of cracks. Concrete doesn't "bow" without cracking. It has to be past being able to support the building safely.

New England is a pretty safe bet for really strong foundations because the whole place sits on solid granite.

It is good for building strong foundations in normal times but the plates in the East are rigid and transmit seismic energy over a much larger area...I could buy a condo in a 8 story brick mill building from

They also blame the regional transit agency for pumping out ground water nearby, while building the salesforce tower. Yes, the 100 million partially come from local transit agencies. And the local agencies are living on federal life support. So, U.S. tax payers are paying for the mistake.

That's the deep pocket the Tower developers will go after to cover their losses. No doubt about it.

The Feds are very free with money, but they only tend to give it to people rich enough to make it worth their while to fire up the presses to print the required quantity out...

You mean people who don't matter will be paying for it, Elon Musk ain't paying shit

Federal government has to give you permission to sue it, and there's always an inadequate maximum dollar amount allowed.