San Francisco supervisor calls emergency meeting to discuss Millenium Tower

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Concerned and frustrated neighbors gathered at San Francisco City Hall Tuesday over Millennium Tower. The emergency meeting was called following a report that the building could withstand a major earthquake.

RELATED: New reports says SF's leaning Millennium Tower is earthquake safe

One of the big questions was -- what does withstand mean? How much damage are we talking?

San Francisco City Administrator Naomi Kelly says she doesn't have a crystal ball, but it should mean the residents should be able to get out of the building alive. What happens after is a lingering question.

"The building has now sunk 17 inches and is tilting more than 14 inches toward Freemont Street," said Kelly.

RELATED: Memo for emergency hearing for SF's Millennium Tower

Despite continued settling, the city administrator's office put out a report Monday that the building could withstand a major, 8.0 earthquake but the engineering analysis, done in part by Stanford Professor Gregory Deierlein, was based off data and information commissioned by the building's developer, not an independent study.

"We didn't verify any of that," said engineer Gregory Deierlein. "We did do some back of the envelope calculations."

"There is a systemic, institutional unwillingness to take this issue seriously," said San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin.

Tuesday's meeting was ordered by Peskin, who is frustrated with the city's inability to prevent future Millennium Tower-like construction problems. "I think what is going on here is that the powers that be, apparently I'm not one of them, are so scared of slowing down the spate of high rise construction that they want to see no evil, hear no evil and do nothing about it bc they don't want to slow down the development of San Francisco's Downtown," he told ABC7 News.

"We will meet as a group and continue regular monitoring to make sure that building is safe," said Kelly.

Officials say they don't know what the next steps will be.

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