Residents of yet another South Florida condominium were forced to quickly evacuate on Tuesday after an engineering inspection raised “serious concerns” about the building’s structural integrity. The 63-year-old Majestic Isle condominium in North Bay Village is just miles from the Port Royale condominiums that were evacuated in a similar manner in October 2022, and Surfside, where the Champlain Towers South collapse killed 98 people in 2021.
Florida’s coast is exceptionally vulnerable to numerous climate impacts, including coastal erosion and flooding driven by sea level rise, that can undermine buildings’ structural integrity and will likely lead to more sudden evacuations in the future, North Bay Village’s mayor, Brent Latham told the New York Times. The building inspection cited rain and termite damage stemming from years of neglect as the cause of the building’s dangerous lack of integrity. (New York Times $, AP, WSVN, CBS, Local10; Climate Signals background: Sea level rise, Coastal flooding increase; Hurricanes, Extreme precipitation events)