MIAMI — It has been
more than a year since the Surfside Condominium collapsed.
Since then, in Miami, Florida, there have been several
evacuations and partial collapses in buildings deemed
unsafe.
“What I have noticed, the one thing in common with a lot of
these places is maintenance or lack thereof,” explained
forensic engineer Rick De La Guardia.
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Search and rescue crews work atop the rubble at the Champlain Towers South condo building, where scores of people remain missing after it partially collapsed the week before, Wednesday, June 30, 2021, in Surfside. |
De La Guardia believed the culprit is a
flawed process that starts with condo boards.
“Condo boards are typically the ones with too much power and
are not provided with oversight. For example, if there is an
inspection report that says that work needs to be done,
nobody is going to be overseeing them, that the work
actually gets done,” he explains.
And after Surfside, lawmakers hoped that would change. They
made alterations to the re-certification process, saying
that multi-family buildings -- three stories or more -- need
to be re-certified every 30 years, then every ten years
after that.
For buildings near the coastline, it happens every 25 years.
But De La Guardia thinks more needs to be done to keep
people safe. He hopes oversight teams get created, as well
as making sure every building has qualified professionals
making life-saving decisions.
“Most buildings don’t have engineers,” shares De La Guardia.
“They have an engineering department, they call them
engineers, but they are essentially glorified handy people;
they don’t have the knowledge of the skills to determine
when repairs of a structural nature need to be made.”
As for the recent evacuations in South Florida, a Port
Royale employee told Florida 24 Network that all employees
had moved back into the condominium but would not answer
questions on whether engineers had returned to survey the
space.
As for the apartment building in Hialeah, dozens of families
were relocated by the Red Cross in October. Since then,
according to County Commissioner Rene Garcia, many of them
were given the option to break their lease and have found
accommodations elsewhere.
Garcia also shares that the City of Hialeah is now working
with the owner of the property to get the proper permits to
do everything in their power to make the building habitable
once again.