Thursday, September 29, 2016

The Leaning Tower of San Francisco

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was built between 1173 and 1372.


It leans of course, because the designers didn’t do an adequate job of foundation investigations. Now, almost a thousand years later, we have advanced substantially in the area of soil mechanics and this wouldn’t happen today.  Oops, not so fast, There's a 58-story skyscraper in San Francisco that is both sinking and leaning. It was built on artificial filled ground dredged up from the bay, famous for collapsing buildings in the 1989 earthquake. 

Since the building is a condominium, buyers are kind of stuck. I have been working under the assumption that tall San Francisco skyscrapers were properly designed to be earthquake safe, but it looks like this one will fall over in the next “big one” and take some adjacent buildings with it.

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