A two-story building in Miami Beach built in 1939 may be ordered to close after a city inspector found “evidence of structure deterioration, to include spalling concrete.”
The owners of the building, at 6881 Indian Creek Dr., have until Monday to submit an engineer’s report to the city or face an evacuation order, the city said Friday. The 30-room building is listed online as the Devon Apartments.
Miami Beach’s Housing and Community Services Department has been “mobilized to assist,” according to a memo from City Manager Alina T. Hudak.
“The Building Official visited the site today and determined that there was no need to evacuate the building today, however, the expectation is that progress on the additional structural engineering analysis must be made by Monday,” a city spokeswoman wrote in a statement.
A representative of the building did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
After the June 24 collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo, the city sent inspectors to 507 older buildings undergoing Miami-Dade County’s 40-year recertification process, which requires structural and electrical evaluations of older buildings after 40 years — and every 10 years after that.
The city on July 3 evacuated a South Beach condo at 1619 Lenox Ave. after an inspector flagged a flooring system failure in a vacant unit and damage to exterior walls.
Now, the building department has flagged another 10 buildings for concerns “severe enough to be issued Unsafe Structure notices requiring more immediate compliance,” Hudak’s memo said. The city placed red “Unsafe Structure” placards at the entrances to the buildings found to be in violation, according to the memo. After the memo was issued, the city released a list of the properties it was concerned about but narrowed the list to nine buildings.
The building at 6881 Indian Creek Dr. is among those the city highlighted as being in violation. The others are: 5333 Collins Ave., 1676 Alton Rd., 401 Ocean Dr., 1000 West Ave., 345 Ocean Dr., 1250 Ocean Dr., 8233 Harding Ave. and 8035 Crespi Blvd.
Six of the buildings are listed as “complying” and three as “pending,” with the Indian Creek Drive property carrying the additional label that it “may need to be vacated.”
“Others will need varying levels of enforcement, for example, securing balconies,” Hudak wrote.
In an interview, Mayor Dan Gelber said the public should not be alarmed but that the city is taking the issue of building safety “very seriously.”
“People need to be calm, but they also need to recognize that we’re not going to kick the can down the road,” Gelber said. “We’re very serious about making sure everybody is complying with the building codes. It’s not negotiable.”