The calls and emails suddenly started pouring in for Lisa Gardner, president of the condominium association at the Marenas Beach Resort.
A scientific study, led by the University of Miami, published in December had found that 35 buildings along Miami’s barrier islands were sinking beyond what was typically expected. The Marenas, a 28-floor condo hotel in Sunny Isles Beach, was one of them. Residents wanted to know what to think.
“I have owners that still call or email me, and they’re very concerned. They’re scared,” Gardner said. But she could provide an immediate answer that most building managers along the coast could not: No worries. While the study found that the Marenas had sunken by about 1 inch between 2016 and 2023, monitoring sensors the building had installed in June 2024 showed that everything was in order.
“I can tell you today that we, the Marenas Beach Resort, we have monitoring in place, and our structure has not moved. We have real time data,” Gardner told the Herald.
Gardner and her board spent about $20,000 to install an innovative wireless sensor system after construction of the St. Regis had begun next door. That luxury condo project will rise over 60 floors high — more than double the height of the Marenas.
“That’s huge,” Gardner said on a recent Sunday, framed by residents and tourists enjoying the pool and beach, and, right next to it, heavy machinery that will drill pilings hundreds of feet into the ground to carry the two towers. “They’re going to be digging and their construction can affect our foundation, our structure, just anything,” she said.
For $1,600 in monthly maintenance, the Miami-based company SmartCore gives her access to data that would flag any possible damage and help assess the reasons, which could be used in case of potential litigation.
The system was created by Mario Verciani, an entrepreneur who moved to Miami a few years before the 2021 collapse of Champlain Tower South in Surfside, which killed 98 people and has triggered state orders for sweeping engineering inspections and maintenance overhauls for aging condos.
Looking for assurance
Verciani lived in 38-story Bay House, a luxury condo in Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood, where he said residents in the wake of tragedy feared even stepping out onto their balconies to enjoy the sweeping views of Biscayne Bay.
As a recently minted HOA board member, Verciani thought that the least he could do was to assure residents of the building’s safety. But when he asked the building’s engineers to send a statement, the answer was “no can do.”
“There’s really nobody who can guarantee that a building is safe,” he said.
As a private pilot, Verciani knew that even the metal in the tiniest screws of a plane could be traced all the way back to the mine where it originated — after all, nobody would want to get on a plane if its safety can’t be guaranteed, he said.
That high-rises that accommodate even more people than a plane didn’t have similar standards baffled him, he said. Each party involved in the construction, he learned, would point to the fact that they were only responsible for one aspect — the design, the soil analysis, or construction. Nobody was willing to vouch for the entirety of the building.
Though not the only company that deploys sensors to monitor buildings, Verciani founded SmartCore with the technology of Italian company Move Solutions, whose sensors are deployed to monitor a bridge in Denver, railways in the UK, and the Colosseum in Rome. At large grain silos in Lebanon, the sensors alerted engineers of the imminent collapse, allowing for the site to be secured.
“The general objective here is to monitor the overall performance of the building over time,” Verciani said as he walked around the 30 sensors installed on Bay House’s columns since 2023. Connected to a server, they record the most minute movements, from indiscernible vibrations to potential tilting. “0.000015 degrees accurate,” Verciani said, pointing up the 28th floor, where the highest sensors are located.
Some measure vibration, others, tilting. By logging into SmartCore’s platform, engineers can determine the structural integrity, and remedy any issues long before they lead to fissures, cracks, or other symptoms visible to the naked eye. They’d also be able to pick up whether a building is slowly sinking, which can lead to structural issues, especially if one side of a building sinks faster than the other. Most famously, the leaning tower of Pisa, has been tilting since it is too heavy for the soil it was built on some 850 years ago. Millions have since been invested to keep it from collapsing.
More recently, the 58-story, architecture-award winning Millennium Tower in San Francisco has gained notoriety as it sank more than expected, leading to the top to tilt more than 28 inches. A hurricane-proof window has plummeted dozens of stories, and an additional $100 million investment appears to have failed to remedy the tilt.
Though a crooked building isn’t necessarily unsafe, it is unlikely to attract investors, or make residents feel at peace.
Verciani believes that South Florida is the perfect launch pad precisely because of its challenging conditions — hurricanes, soil made of layers of sand and porous limestone, tidal flows and salt water that can corrode metal used in construction. Wouldn’t it be obvious, he said, “that when you build in these difficult, challenging environments, you just want to monitor them and see and make sure that the building is fine?”
The University of Miami study did not point to any immediate safety concerns, but the unexpected sinking could potentially lead to long-termstructural issues in buildings with hundreds of units, including penthouses that cost millions of dollars. The study also raised questions over the reasons, which experts say will have to be investigated, and the implications for the future of construction.
South Florida’s soil, composed of layers of sand and porous limestone, has always posed a challenge for developers. But advancements in construction and the billions of dollars that can be made from oceanside apartments have developers reaching for the sky.
Miami now boasts the third tallest skyline in the US — right after New York and Chicago. By 2028, the 85-floor Panorama, which currently holds the title for tallest building in Miami-Dade, will be overshadowed by the new Waldorf Astoria. At more than 1,000 feet, it is set to be the first classified as a “supertall skyscraper.”
New construction projects “accelerated, if not instigated,” the sinking, the University of Miami study found, pointing to vibration from drilling that can shift and further compress the layers of sand underneath buildings nearby.
The sensors, Verciani said, are able to detect any such movement. Engineers could also use the data to learn how a building behaves and changes over time, and infer how to construct better in the future. At Bay House, he said the certainty that the building is in good shape helped lower last year’s increase in insurance from 11% to 5%.
Though the business started less than two years ago, Verciani says he’s now in talks with several buildings identified in the study. Experts also say that the need to better understand how buildings perform in South Florida’s already challenging environment is only set to increase. As greenhouse gas emissions keep warming our climate, hurricanes and rainfalls are getting more intense. Rising sea levels and higher tidal flows allow salt water to seep into areas they hadn’t reached before, which can lead to underground corrosion.
Gardner, a part-time resident who also lives in Texas, said that she hadn’t considered these changes when she invested in the Marenas in 2021. “Obviously, everyone that’s living on the beach, it’s a choice, right? It’s a pleasure, but you don’t really think about sea levels and sinking when you’re buying, until you’re involved and really know what’s going on,” she said.
The sensors, she said, have bought her peace of mind. Christmas Eve became an unintended test run: Registering unusually high vibration, the sensors set off alerts that had everyone freaking out, Gardner said. It quickly became clear that a technician changing a battery simply forgot to disable the alarm. Though unfortunate, it was also a proof of concept, Verciani said. “It’s doing what it’s intended to,” he said.
This climate report is funded by Florida International University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald retains editorial control of all content.
This story was produced in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
