Two-Thirds of Miami Condo Buildings Are Older Than 30 Years. Repair Bills Are Due

[UrbanImpact]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Isn't this regulated by Miami-Dade County? So it would be the same authority regulating Surfside and Miami City?

Re: NYC, I don't think NYC has ever had a collapse of this magnitude (9/11 excluded). The building collapses that have occurred in the past decade or so have been caused by external events.

Surfside has it's own building department, however, I'm not sure if it did at the time of the Champlain Towers construction. Miami-Dade County regulates Fire, Grease, and sometimes Water & Sewer for other cities.

I'm submitting plans for a fast food restaurant in Miami Gardens at the moment and it has to go through the City of Miami Gardens building department, Miami-Dade County DERM (for Fire and Grease), and City of North Miami Beach Water & Sewer.

[niwell]

7 or 8 years ago a file I was attached to at work (building code policy at the time) was a mall collapse in Northern Ontario. While there were numerous factors that ultimately led to the collapse a major one was corrosion from salt water - the roof of the mall was a parking deck and they had salted and piled snow during the winter. Also of note that mall was built to the code of the time, but using a particular sealing technique that would not be up to code today - that wouldn't have been changed until the roof needed to be resealed.

But yeah, salt water wreaks havoc on pretty much everything. Given the high water table and porous karst limestone I imagine Miami is at particular risk. Given the topography of a place like Rio it would seem that anchoring to bedrock is much easier and there's less salt water intrusion (could be wrong of course).

Not really sure how building codes work in the US - in Ontario the code is province-wide but it's up to individual municipalities to interpret and enforce. There have been issues in smaller places where the same level of expertise may not exist.

[mhays]

I imagine coastal storm-related saltwater spray and flooding being worse than being behind an inlet for example.