Newsflash!
The Leaning Tower of Pisa has been straightened!
It’s true!
And not by the Evil Superman from Superman III!
Of course, they didn’t straighten it all the way, but they returned it to the angle it was leaning at in 1838.
Why?
EXCERPT:
[British rescue committee engineering] Prof Burland said it could have collapsed "at any moment". However, it took nine years of bureaucratic wrangling before any work was done. "That was the difficult bit, getting the work going," Prof Burland said.
Yeah, big surprise on that last part. Italy.
Oh, and the Italian estimate of when it would have collapsed differed:
"If we had not stepped in the tower would have collapsed between 2030 and 2040," said Salvatore Settis, the president of the committee. "This is crucial for the tower’s stability and it was a totally Italian success."
Uhh . . . except for that British guy who worked on the project.
Oh, and there was a particularly tense moment:
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 Prof Burland. The weights were hastily reattached.
Good idea!
