Thursday, December 19, 2024

South Florida sees dozens of luxury high-rise buildings start to sink


Miami’s barrier islands are home to many tall luxury buildings, and, according to a study recently published in Earth and Space Science, about three dozen are sinking.

Thirty-five luxury condos and hotels across Florida’s Sunny Isles Beach, Surfside, Miami Beach and Bal Harbour have faced subsidence in the past handful of years, the study found.

It was authored by researchers from the University of Miami, Florida Atlantic University, University of Houston, University of Hanover in Germany, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and California Institute of Technology. 

It involved reviewing Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar data. 

The sinking of the high-rises amounted to 2-8 centimeters over a multiyear span running 2016 through 2023, according to the researchers.

High-rises expect to see “up to several tens of centimeters” of settlement “during and immediately after construction,” the University of Miami Rosenstiel School said in a Friday post on its website.

Builders constructed a “majority” of the affected condos and hotels after 2014, according to the study.

“We found that subsidence in most high-rises slows down over time, but in some cases, it continues at a steady rate. This suggests that subsidence could persist for an extended period,” senior author Falk Amelung was quoted as saying. 

The study authors had some theories about what was behind the subsidence, based on their research. 

The sinking “is primarily due to the gradual reconfiguration of the sand grains into a denser packing within sandy layers interbedded in the limestone” in the area, the study said. 

The researchers hypothesized a link between construction-related vibrations or groundwater flow and the sinking, according to the study. Other things like daily tidal flow and stormwater injection could also have factored into the phenomenon. 

“The discovery of the extent of subsidence hotspots along the South Florida coastline was unexpected. The study underscores the need for ongoing monitoring and a deeper understanding of the long-term implications for these structures,” lead author Farzaneh Aziz Zanjani said. 

The broader Miami-Dade County had a population of nearly 2.7 million people as of July 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

More than 27.2 million people visited the area last year, per the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau.

2 comments:

  1. Haverstraw on the Hudson River was where most material for bricks was extracted from in the 1800s. So much was extracted from the ground under the municipality that in the early 1900s the town basically imploded similar to mayseh Korach vaAdasoi. Gas lines ruptured sparking explosions & fires. In happened in the middle of a dead cold winter so many of the injured ended up freezing to death before first responders could get to them. The Rov of the shtot was among the dead. That is the oldest shul in Rockland County that goes back 150+ years. Although the place is today Open Falshodox & struggles to get minyan, Haverstraw is in any case being overrun by Yeshivishe & Tuna Beigels, except for the Downtown which is full of wetback Mexicans.

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  2. Main St pizza fresserDecember 19, 2024 at 7:49 PM

    The whole Kew Gardens Hills & going north through what is today Flushing Meadows Park & up to the bay off the East River, was an uninhabitable swamp. Greedy industrialists saw it as an opportunity for a free dumping ground for toxic waste, making the whole area into a massive toxic dump. In order to make Queens attractive in the bidding process for the 1930s World Fair, the President ordered a large scale landfill. (If any of you are old enough to remember, heimishe real estate agents were farkoifing KGH to frummeh in the 1960s as if it's cheesebox row houses were the hottest thing since sliced bread. This is par for the course in heimishe real estate. The greedy fresser developers with their RE broker collaborators sniff out parcels that are defective & make a killing on the differential from billig purchase to premium sale. Nowadays you see it in Lakewood, Howell & Monsey in proximity to high voltage lines that most goyish developers stay away from. You see it in Toms River & Jackson where carcinogenic chemicals were dumped. And you see it in Naugatuck CT near Waterbury that's in the flood zone & has other problems). Touro College has 2 campuses in KGH and one of Touro's owners is shutef in the Opal twin highrise towers, for what passes as "luxury" apts, by KGH standards al kol ponim. Because the many tons of these towers are built on a filled in swamp, the tenants on the first floor have gone through many years of Hell with burst water pipes from the building settling destroying their belongings. And no studies have been conducted on effects from toxic gases seeping out. Even without a study, Opal residents know first hand how all kinds of exotic pesky bugs no one has ever seen come out from the depths on to the playground & into the complex's internal pipe system.

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