San Francisco Spent $100 Million to Save a Sinking Tower. It Leaned More

Under the sidewalk on Mission Street in San Francisco there are eighteen steel pipes, two feet wide, that go down 250 feet to bedrock. They were not part of the building. They were added later, for $100 million, to stop a 58-storey concrete tower from sinking into the clay under the city. The tower opened in 2009 on 940 piles that stopped in sand, 220 feet short of the rock. By opening day it had already settled ten inches. By 2016 it was sixteen inches down and leaning to the northwest. The fix, drilling new piles to bedrock along two sides, started in 2020 and for a year made the lean worse. This is the story of what it costs to hold a tower still: the redesign, the jacks, the one million pounds on each pile, and the numbers the instruments still report every few months. Chapters 00:00 A steel pipe under the sidewalk 00:54 A concrete tower on sand 01:43 Two hundred feet from the rock 02:25 The clay 03:10 The neighbours start digging 03:45 The lean 04:12 The residents find out 04:58 The lawsuits 05:29 The plan: 52 piles to bedrock 06:37 The fix makes it worse 07:12 Eighteen piles 08:25 The jacks 09:26 What it stands on today 10:04 What $100 million bought Held Together is about the systems that hold water, ground and weight in place, and that nobody notices while they work. New documentary every week. Images in this video are a mix of real photographs (credited below), AI-generated stills and two AI-generated clips; the voice is AI-generated. Figures come from published engineering reports and press coverage of the Millennium Tower settlement and the perimeter pile upgrade (2009–2024). Photo credits: Hydrogen Iodide at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Daniel Ramirez from Honolulu, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Cheers. Trance addict - Armin van Buuren - Oceanlab, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) homebucket, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) The wub, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Fullmetal2887, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Victorgrigas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Dead.rabbit, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) ArnoldReinhold, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) DestinationFearFan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Hydrogen Iodide at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) James St. John, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Pexels photos by Yena Kwon, Josh Hild, tom analogicus, Magda Ehlers, Jimmy Liao, IslandHopper X, Diego F. Parra, Tima Miroshnichenko, Markus Winkler, Andrius, Griffin Wooldridge, kazuyoshi sakamoto, Quang Nguyen Vinh, Emmanuel Correia, Brett Sayles, Solenn Thircuir, Mikhail Nilov, Nic Wood, Freek Wolsink, Vladimir Srajber, Ron Lach, Mak_ jp, Kamil Čičila, Adinath Gilande, Khoiru Ummah Kendari 24, Joshua Mueller, Krakograff Textures, Martin Cheung, KAILAS PRASAD, Max Vakhtbovych, Tom Fisk. #engineering #infrastructure #sanfrancisco #millenniumtower #megaprojects #documentary