San Francisco's SINKING Tower Cost $100M. Then It Won an Award.

In two thousand nine, San Francisco's Millennium Tower opened as the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi. Fifty eight stories, four hundred and nineteen homes, seven hundred and fifty million dollars in sales. It had already sunk ten inches before the first resident moved in. This video takes the case apart: the Old Bay Clay under the site, the nine hundred and ninety friction piles that stopped ninety feet down instead of reaching bedrock at two hundred and twenty, the geotechnical report that predicted four to six inches of settlement over the building's entire lifetime, and the hundred million dollar repair that made the tower tilt faster while it was being installed. It ends with the part nobody tells: in twenty twenty five, that repair won Structure of the Year. Sources: Engineering News-Record · STRUCTURE magazine · NCSEA · ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering · NBC Bay Area · the 2020 class action settlement. CHAPTERS 00:00 The tower that sinks 01:10 The dream 01:57 The hidden crack 03:18 Why it sinks 04:53 They knew 06:11 Who is to blame 07:19 The fix that made it worse 09:23 The award Some shots are recreations. Archive photographs of the Millennium Tower © Frank Schulenburg, Michaelgimbel, ArnoldReinhold, The wub, Dead.rabbit, Cheers and others (CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons). Subsidence measurement © ESA. Constructum in Spanish:    / @constructum_es