Residents were ordered to evacuate an apartment block in North Miami Beach, Florida, after engineers found the five-story building unsafe, a discovery that comes months after a fatal apartment block collapsed in nearby Surfside.
Arthur Surrey, the city manager of North Miami Beach, said the company that the owners of Bayview 60 Homes leased to help upgrade the building to regulations for the upcoming 50-year re-certification alerted officials to its assessment on Monday. The structure, which was built in 1972, had previously passed its 40-year rehabilitation checks.
In a letter written on Friday and received by city building officials on Monday, structural engineer Bronislaus B. Torensky said his company found excessive “skew” — or sagging — in concrete slabs on the building’s second and third floors.
“It is therefore my responsibility to inform you that the structure of the building is structurally unsound and must be vacated immediately,” Turinsky wrote.
Engineering experts have said in interviews that a certain amount of deflection in a building’s concrete slabs is normal, but too much could be a sign that the building is unsafe.
Unsafe amounts of deflection often include fracturing, said Rick Slider, a structural engineer in South Florida.
Turinsky’s letter did not say whether his company had found a crack.
“The city is working with the owner to ensure that all residents receive appropriate assistance as they move within the next 24 hours,” Suri said. “The safety of residents is our number one concern and we are working as quickly as possible to mobilize our resources at the construction site.”
The city manager’s office has confirmed that tenants will be reimbursed for the next three nights’ stay by up to $150 per night, and will return the April rent and security deposits by the building’s owners. Officials will help make arrangements for them to retrieve their personal belongings.
Surrey said the owners of Bayview 60 Homes began the process of inspecting the building in July last year, after 98 people were killed in the collapse of an apartment building in Surfside, just south of north Miami Beach.
The arduous search and rescue effort began after several floors of the South Champlain Towers fell abruptly in late June. Roughly a month and weeks after the rest of the building was demolished in a controlled explosion, officials were able to identify victim 98.
The official cause is still under investigation by federal authorities, although findings by consulting engineer Frank Morabito in 2018 showed “abundant cracks” and collapse in the underground parking garage of the 12-storey building.
A Miami-Dade County grand jury investigating the collapse also assumed that a saltwater intrusion may have damaged the building’s foundation, according to a December report.
In July, North Miami Beach officials ordered evictions at the Crestview Towers Condominium, also built in 1972. A January 2021 report said the 156-unit complex “was structurally and electrically unsafe.”
The report was reported by the building’s management to the North Miami Beach building and zoning department after the Surfside collapse.
The destruction of the Champlain South Towers has led to further scrutiny of the structural maintenance of older buildings throughout South Florida, particularly those governed by condo associations. Officials at the time promised to change the process of safety inspections in apartment buildings.
But state lawmakers last month failed to reach agreement on a bill that would require inspections of older apartment buildings and authorize condominium boards to conduct studies to determine how much they need to set aside for repairs.
State Representative Daniel Perez, a Miami-Dade County Republican, sponsored a bill that would have closed a loophole that would allow these councils to avoid putting money into the reserves. But the Florida Senate rejected the proposal, saying it would impose a heavy financial burden on apartment owners.
“This was not a negotiable piece for us,” Perez said at the time. “We’ve never negotiated a waiver of the reserves, because that’s part of the problem that caused the accident at Surfside.”
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