San Francisco city Supervisor Aaron Peskin on Tuesday called for a hearing into what led the Millennium Tower to tilt and sink "alarmingly" further since construction started on what had been billed as a permanent fix for the long troubled building.
Crews started installing new piles on the outside of the existing foundation in May. NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit was first to report the building has sunk another inch and is now leaning five more inches toward Fremont Street. The lean now totals 22 inches.
“The sinking and tilting tower Millennium is back,” Peskin told his colleagues Tuesday afternoon, “and it is time to reopen investigatory hearings on that matter, particularly in light of continuing and ongoing revelations at the Department of Building Inspection.”
Peskin held the first string of hearings back in 2016 after news broke that the building began sinking and tilting soon after construction started.
On Tuesday, he said he wants a follow-up on those hearings “as the building alarmingly has begun to sink and tilt again as the stabilization process was initiated and now stopped."
The building’s homeowner association has said work will resume as soon as engineers determine how to mitigate the chance of further tilting or settlement tied to the installation of the piles along Fremont and Mission streets.
Meanwhile, the city-appointed panel advising building inspection officials about the project has expressed full confidence in the engineers behind the fix project. The building inspection department has been a focus of the FBI’s ongoing City Hall corruption probe.
Tom Hui, who ran the department and testified about the Millennium Tower during Peskin’s earlier hearings, resigned in the midst of the scandal but has not been charged.
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