MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – Good news is coming for people living in the Port Royale building on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach: they could be back in their homes as soon as early next week.
On Tuesday, Local 10 News got an exclusive look at the damage that led to Thursday’s evacuation of the 164-unit condo building.
“It was a hard decision to make, but under the circumstances I don’t think we had a choice,” Douglas Mercado, the president and general manager of Inspection Engineers, Inc., said.
Mercado said about 10 months ago, his company was hired to do the Port Royale’s 50-year recertification. During its inspection at the time, the company’s engineers marked several areas for repairs, specifically on some cracking in the parking deck’s slab, and on several major support beams.
The building’s association went through the process of hiring a contractor and getting the permits needed for the work, and began the repairs about four weeks ago. But, when Mercado’s engineers came back last week to check on the progress, they spotted some concerning changes.
“On two beams, one in the north one in the south, we noticed the cracks had expanded and there was small deflection on the beam,” he said.
Mercado explained deflection essentially means the beam was sagging slightly—about half an inch.
The engineers immediately reached out to the City of Miami Beach who sent their own staff to check out the damage and they agreed the cracks were very concerning, especially since those beams were thought to be holding up the entire structure.
“If that beam and the other beam were supporting the entire building, over 400,000 pounds, approximately, our engineers were really concerned that we could have a collapse, at least a partial collapse,” Mercado said.
So residents were ordered to evacuate and a company specializing in shoring up heavy loads was brought in to do its own inspection, along with another specialist who worked on investigating the nearby Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside.
“The good news from them is that they think that the loads are distributed on the slabs for each floor,” Mercado said. “They don’t think (the beams) are sustaining the full load.”
Now, the shoring specialists will create a design for stabilizing the beams in question and Mercado is hopeful that, once they get the plan approved by the city of Miami Beach, they could get to work putting those supports in place as early as Thursday.
“That will secure the structure and I think probably by Monday we should be able to tell the people they can come back,” he said.