Tower of Pisa saved from collaps LONDON: An international team, including engineers and
soil mechanic
experts has saved the world-famous Leaning Tower of Pisa from collapse.
The 14 experts were part of a £20 million project to save the tower, which was on the verge of collapse.
According to a report in the Telegraph, the tower has been straightened by 18 inches, returning it to its 1838 position.
Professor John Burland, an expert in soil mechanics at Imperial College London, who was the only British member in the rescue committee, however, said that the tower is tilting "very slightly", but stabilising.
The tower, which has been leaning almost since building work first began in 1173, was closed to the public in 1990 because of safety fears. The 183-foot tower was nearly 15 feet off vertical and its structure was found to have been weakened by centuries of strain.
Burland said it could have collapsed "at any moment". However, it took nine years of bureaucratic wrangling before any work was done.
The last attempt at
straightening the tower was carried out under orders from Benito Mussolini, who wanted it to be perfectly vertical. Concrete was poured into the foundations, but the result was that the tower sank further into the soil. The President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, praised the straightening of the tower.
The straightening work involved the extraction of around 70 tonnes of earth from the northern side of the tower, causing it to sink on that side. Before the digging started, the tower was anchored with steel cables and 600 tonnes of lead weights.
However, halfway through the project, concerns at the ugliness of the weights led to their removal and the tower lurched dramatically. "In one night, the tower moved more than it had averaged in an entire year," said Burland. The weights were hastily reattached.
The Italian government stepped in after a tower collapsed in Pavia in 1989, killing four people. The experts suddenly realised that the tower at Pisa, which was similarly built and on the same sort of earth, could do the same.
The Leaning Tower is the bell-tower of Pisa Cathedral and sits in the Campo dei Miracoli, or Field of Miracles. It weighs 14,500 tonnes and is actually curved, because its builders tried to compensate for its subsidence during construction.
var RN = new String (Math.random());
var RNS = RN.substring (2,11);
var b2 = '''';
if (doweshowbellyad==1)
bellyad.innerHTML = b2;