When developers began transforming the kitschy waterfront motels of Sunny Isles Beach into luxury high-rise condos and hotels more than two decades ago, they were confident they understood the challenges of erecting massive towers on shifting sand.
They were wrong.
It turned out to be far more complicated than anyone expected. Within just a few years, engineers discovered they’d underestimated how much some buildings would sink on a barrier island composed of varying layers of sand, silt, peat and porous limestone — much the same material underlying many of South Florida’s premier oceanfront properties.
In their own reports filed with the city, geotechnical engineers acknowledged the miscalculations. As one firm wrote a decade into the building boom: “We note that this area of Sunny Isles has had several tower structures settle significantly more than predicted.”
At least a handful of towers have sunk as much as two to three times more than expected, the Miami Herald found in a months-long analysis of dozens of engineering reports covering nearly every building along the city’s multibillion-dollar skyline. The reports, crucial to the design of building foundations, show a long-running struggle to accurately predict the amount of sinking and continuing questions over how to curb it. #climatechange #miami #southflorida #realestate #sunnyisles ##developer
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✍️: Denise Hruby
📹: @ashleymiznazi
📸: @matiasocner