THE SKY IS RISING

by Bob Walsh

OK, the sky isn’t really rising. However, if you live in the VERY prestigious Millennium Tower in the People’s Republic of San Francisco you might very well think so.

Why is that you might ask. That is because the building, at 301 Mission St., which has some very nice $10 million condos, is sinking. Rapidly and precipitously and unevenly.

The building, which was completed in 2008, has sunk 16 inches since then. It is also leaning 2” out-of-plumb to the northwest. That is making some of the residents of the 58-story edifice a tad uneasy.

The folks who built it assert that this settlement and tilting “has not significantly affected the seismic performance of the building and does not represent a safety risk.”

The tower is right next to the Transbay Transit Center, which was started two years after the tower was completed. At that time the tower had already “settled” ten inches. The tower’s builders stated originally that the building would settle about 4 inches during its lifetime. I guess they were wrong.

The engineers and lawyers are lining up. There is a LOT of money at stake and a lot of responsibility to be claimed and-or denied. The Millennium Tower builders used very little steel and a lot of concrete in the building, making it much heavier than a steel-framed skyscraper of similar size. The builders assert that this is a preferred method of building and was not done for cost savings.