Try selling a condo on the 50th floor with the small caveat that there is no working elevator service or that the shit that ends up in the toilet won't end up in the city's sewage system. However, if they DON'T do this fix, the building will continue to slowly tilt until things simply stop working correctly in the building. They are putting huge amounts of money into something that doesn't have a super high percentage chance of being successful. I have seen and read through the plans myself (not recently but a month or so ago) and I noticed that there are a lot of things that could potentially go wrong as they dig holes on the side of the building that go down to the bedrock.Īt this point, given all the information we have been given about how the building is reacting to the fixes, I feel that the are basically following the "sunk cost" economic fallacy. I have heard that the price tag for this "fix" will be in the hundreds of millions and may exceed the price of the initial building itself. As the building continues to lean more and more, it places additional stresses on the elevator due to the design tolerances being exceeded for the shaft and how the elevator moves up and down within the shaft. When the building starts to lean and continues to lean in a specific direction, those small declines in the plumbing start to disappear completely.Īlso, the elevator is essential for a building of that size. The lines for the sewage system are slightly tilted in some areas to allow gravity to work to literally pull the shit down to ground floor and below. When a building goes out of plumb by such a significant margin, the plumbing starts to fail. There are a lot of things in that building that depend on the building being basically level. But again, the odds of that happening are basically such that it wouldn't happen given what we currently know about the clay / sand below the foundation. Essentially the building would lean into a fall and then collapse while tilting. The building itself most likely won't just "fall over." In fact, if it did start leaning to such an amount where it fell over, the structural weight on some of the columns would cause those columns to collapse. So how safe is the building currently? Well, it depends who you ask and what their credentials are as an engineer but the building contractor has said the building could lean over 6+ feet and still remain safe during an earthquake. Instead, the building reached that level almost immediately after construction. The initial projection was that the building would settle around ~10 inches and that it would be basically an even settlement. They decided NOT to do that and as they were building, the building started to lean a few inches immediately. If they had elected to go down to bedrock initially, the extra costs associated with the foundation part of the project was somewhere between 3-5 million (so essentially it would have added ~1% to the total cost of the project). Finally, you get to bedrock after that layer. Below that layer is the Colma sand layer and below THAT layer is the Old Bay Clay layer. Below that, we get into the "Young Bay Clay" layer. The very first layer is basically artificial fill. So let's take a step back and explain exactly what layers of stuff are under the foundation. The foundation itself is around 3 meters thick of concrete with piles that go down to the colma sand layer. They decided to go with a concrete structure which significantly added additional weight to the structure. The original design of the building (from memory, so please correct me or add clarifying info if I'm wrong) was a steel structure which would have weighed around 1/3rd of its present weight. Now, normally this wouldn't be atypical but a few interesting things basically doomed this building from the start. From my understanding, they did get some initial analysis done on the soil below the foundation and then at some point they elected not to extend the piles down to the bedrock. This has been quite the shit show ever since they decided not to hire an engineer that is an expert in geophysics / soil / etc.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |