The tower's tilt now approximates what it had three centuries ago, and engineers say it won't need another overhaul for a few hundred more years. The cyclically varying pitch and roll of the 284-step spiral staircase make for a dizzying experience, especially walking down. The temporary safety cables were removed. The tower settled toward the high side, reducing its 6-degree tilt by half a degree, and its 13-foot overhang by about 17 inches. Then, 41 corkscrew drills angled under the north side to remove soil underneath the 800-year-old foundation. Construction workers placed 100 tons of lead weights on the lip of the north-side foundation, and 340-foot steel cables were installed to hold the tower from any further leaning. In the end, authorities decided to try straightening the tower a bit by getting the high side of the foundation to sink a little. Photographers documented every detail of the structure, and 6,400 of those shots are now available in a remarkable photo tour now archived at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
(Yeah, right.)Īlso considered was a plan to take the tower apart stone by stone and then rebuild it in a way that would keep it from toppling over. (That could have been disastrous, because centuries of standing out of kilter had already stressed some stone structural elements to the point of crumbling.) Another proposal was to build an exact replica of the tower leaning against it from the opposite direction to prop it up. Someone proposed a scheme to drill 10,000 holes in the tower to reduce its weight.
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