San Francisco's Millennium Tower is still tilting 3 inches per year, according to the engineer tasked with fixing it.
The 58-story residential building, located at Freemont and Mission streets in the city’s financial district, is currently tilting 26 inches north and west, engineer Ron Hamburger said at Thursday's San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting (via KNTV). Ten inches of that tilt occurred last year, according to Hamburger.
In 2016, residents were told the tower was settling unevenly. Attempts to stabilize the structure seemingly made things worse, and engineers stopped construction last summer to how to prevent further movement of the foundation.
Hamburger said last week that the luxury tower could eventually tilt as many as 40 inches, at which point the elevators and plumbing could stop working.
At Thursday's hearing, Hamburger said the building is still safe. Reducing the steel piles installed to bedrock 250 feet beneath the building from 52 to 18 is the best way to stop, and possibly reverse, some of the tilting, he added.
The San Francisco Department of Building Inspection wrote in a letter to the tower’s homeowners association that it approved of Hamburger's proposal, according to NBC News. The department said it will examine every pile installation to make sure the process is going as expected.
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