![floating foundation usage floating foundation usage](http://155.138.174.80/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Floating-Slab-Foundation-Cold-Climates.jpg)
The basement is tanked to prevent water infiltration, so there’s a displacement force, but nothing close to the weight of the tower above.īut Garay’s quote doesn’t address the actual system in use here.
![floating foundation usage floating foundation usage](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53f49f22e4b072a0bb2c9d42/1462784452163-HBGX8IS5T0I2GTB3NIHK/image-asset.jpeg)
The excavation for the tower goes 75 feet underground, but bedrock in SOMA is more than 200′ below ground level. Garay’s quote makes it sound like Millennium Tower is a big version of the same problem.
FLOATING FOUNDATION USAGE FULL
As the earth shook, the soil under the water table liquified (exactly like shaking up a french press full of settled coffee grounds), setting the buildings above afloat. After all, shallow foundations on landfill were major factors in the collapse of several much smaller building in the Marina District in the 1989 earthquake. “What we do know is that the foundation of this building does not go into bedrock,” he said. Mark Garay, one of the lawyers for the apartment owners, says it is too early to pinpoint the precise causes for the building sinking, but that it had already begun significantly before work on the transport terminal started. The New York Times yesterday had a particularly misleading take on this, one that SCI-TECH alums should be able to parse out pretty easily: So what’s up? (Disclaimer–all of the following is pure speculation, researched lightly with whatever’s available on line.
![floating foundation usage floating foundation usage](http://www.bunkersilo.com/uploads/1/1/7/2/117288659/9-1_1.jpg)
Politics aside, any building that tall that leans that much is going to attract attention, especially mine. Inspectors were aware of the problems as early as August, 2009, according to some reports, but approved the building anyway. The problems with settlement were first reported a few weeks ago, but the national media (and several friends, family, and SCI-TECH alumni) have now caught wind of the problem and it’s making headlines for the potentially explosive political consequences, if in fact the owners received an overly generous assessment from the city. This is pretty unbelievable, but multiple sources report that San Francisco’s Millennium Tower, finished in 2009 and at 58 stories the tallest residential tower in the city, is experiencing potentially grave problems with settlement–the building as a whole has settled more than 10 inches farther into its site than originally calculated, and it’s done so unevenly, so much so that the tower now has a supposedly noticeable lean.