If you're an athlete, it's good to be tall and lean.
If you're a high-rise apartment building, it's good to be tall, but you don't want to lean.
In San Francisco, the Millennium Tower is leaning to the west - more than ever before - even though outside engineering consultant experts have been working on the problem.
Many of you will remember Charley Eckman, the verbose local sportscaster here in Baltimore. He defined "expert" as "a guy from out of town with a briefcase."
People have known that the building is both sinking and tilting since 2016. To my astonishment, people keep living there. I hope the day never comes that their surviving family members have to say things like, "He believed to the end that that tilting, sinking building was safe to live in."
The current lean is more than 29 inches.
Seen here are engineers, photographed earlier this year, inserting piles at the base of the massive building to try to stabilize it. NBC Bay Area says that while there was some initial improvement of the situation, the leaning has continued.
Ron Hamburger, one of the engineers on the case, says not to get too upset because the data that NBC Bay Area saw is prone to fluctuations, because it was taken from the rooftop. Hamburger says we should be measuring the tilt at the foundation of the building instead, and states that the added tilt is “negligible.”
“We are fully confident that following transfer of the remaining design load to the piles,’’ Hamburger said to NBC Bay Area. “There will be no further …. movement of the roof to the west.”
Uh huh.
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