Shower of glass rains down from 52-story tower in San Francisco

The atmospheric river that barreled across San Francisco on Tuesday brought more than rain: a shower of glass fell from near the top of a 52-story office tower in Downtown.

A window cracked and another popped out from the 43rd floor of 555 California Street, in the Financial District, sending shards of glass to the sidewalk below, the San Francisco Business Times reported.  No one was injured from the fall.

“We have confirmed that we have glass that has separated from its frame on the 43rd floor of a 52-story high-rise and is falling on the ground below,” San Francisco fire Capt. Jonathan Baxter said in a video posted on Twitter at 3:15 p.m.

A shelter-in-place order was issued to the city’s fourth tallest building owned by Vornado Realty Trust and The Trump Organization. The order was lifted three hours later. Streets around the tower remained closed.

The 1.35 million-square-foot building, the second tallest office tower in San Francisco, was built in 1969. In a short video tweeted during the incident, a white pane somersaulted from the upper stories hundreds of feet to the streets below.

“It’s glass,” someone says during the video.  “Oh my God, it’s cracking!”

On Tuesday afternoon, missing glass was visible in two sections of the 43rd floor — along California Street and along Kearny Street. One of the windows was “completely broken out,” according to fire officials, while the other had cracked. 

Occupants of the skyscraper were escorted from the area surrounding the building. 

By 5 p.m., fire officials had secured both impacted windows and building staff had called a window company to “mitigate and, if needed, replace the actual windows,” Baxter, a fire department spokesman, said.

It wasn’t clear Tuesday what might have prompted the windowpane failure. Like the rest of Downtown, the building had been whipped by high winds and rain throughout the afternoon.

The building, home to tenants including Bank of America, McKinsey & Co. and Microsoft, is widely regarded as one of San Francisco’s best office buildings, according to the Business Times.

Vornado reported in regulatory filings last month that the building was 99 percent leased.

Even so, the property made headlines last month as it was placed on a loan servicer watchlist — an indication of potential challenges to a borrower’s ability to stay current on a loan. As of late February, Vornado and Trump, which owns 30 percent of the property, were current on 555 California’s $1.2 billion mortgage. 

— Dana Bartholomew

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