If all continues as expected the saga of not just the fix, but the fix of the fix, for the troubled Millennium Tower in San Francisco may be over by the end of September. The team for the revised perimeter pile upgrade—intended to stem and recover some of the settlement and tilt of the 645-ft-tall tower—reached a milestone last week. Crews successfully completed the initial stage of the transfer of loads from the residential condominium—which has been settling since its completion in 2009—to six new piles to bedrock installed along one side of the building.
“Our expectation was that this first small stage of load transfer would slow substantially, if not stop, the already recently reduced rates of settlement and tilting that has been occurring,” Ronald O. Hamburger, the consulting principal with Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (SGH) who is the engineer-of-record for the upgrade, wrote in a Jan. 29 progress report to the board of the Millennium Tower Association. “Preliminary data shows this has been successful and exceeded the engineering team’s projections.”