I'm not entirely sure I believe the story about the dirt pile being used for compaction. I work in the construction/design industry, and that's not a technique that I'm familiar with; if compaction is required, it's almost always done with pile drivers or compaction rollers attached to vehicles. Piling up dirt on a site seems like a very inefficient way to do it
Given the lack of fixed points in the photos, it's hard to tell what's going on, but I think it might be the excess dirt that is being excavated from elsewhere on the site. I remember hearing that the massive battle-attraction show building would be partially subgrade to fit the scale of the surroundings, similar to Space Mountain and Soarin'. If that's the case, there would be a lot of soil that needs to go somewhere (along with the former railroad/ROA berm) before getting regarded on the site or trucked off to other job sites that need fill, so that could explain why this pile is so large
From what I can see in the photos (which are tough to read on a monitor), it looks like the pile is too far east to be one of the Star Wars buildings. The both attractions will more-or-less back up to Disneyland Drive, right? More likely, it seems to be located on/near the site for future development, which is undoubtedly being used for construction staging in the interim
Have these alleged structural problems ever been confirmed by a reliable source? I thought they were pure urban legends, and given that the structure hasn't collapsed yet or had a major retrofit, I'm still very skeptical. Yes, the floor is a little wonky in places, but that's intentional for drainage.
According to the plot plan on the other site this mound is basically on the place for the Falcon show building. The supposed expansion pad clearly lies to the East (next to ToonTown) and is functioning as the staging area.
As to the Mickey and Friends structural problems, it has been previously reported online that CMs have talked about structural repairs. I don't think it's an urban legend.
All large structures (big box store roofs, etc) have similarly sloped surfaces, but aren't noticeable because you're not driving across them. Traditional parking decks are a series of ramps, so drainage takes care of itself; M&F's layout with discrete levels is a little unique, and required additional consideration for drainage. Other than some strange traffic patterns (including the original layout that was quickly revised due to ped/auto conflicts), nothing about the parking structure's design has ever seemed awry to me
