MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – The residents of an apartment building in North Miami Beach’s Eastern Shores gated community had until 2 p.m. Tuesday to evacuate over safety concerns in the building.
Miami Dade police officers started to evacuate the building along Northeast 167th Street, near Northeast 25h Avenue on Monday.
According to Miami-Dade County property records, the building is part of the Beach Club Villas Condo subdivision. There were 55 units occupied in the building.
“We’re just kind of scrambling getting everything together, but we grabbed our suitcases with our clothes (and) important medical papers,” one resident said.
Residents didn’t have much time to gather their belongings and say there is only one elevator in the building.
“It’s terrible because we only have a few hours, it’s not even a full day,” Florencia Gómez said.
The building informed them they needed to evacuate Monday afternoon and one resident said he went into survival mode when he got the call.
“With the info I got, it wasn’t very clear if the building could go down now, so I was rushing. If it goes down, what am I going to do?” said Francisco Musmanno.
Scaffolding can be seen outback, indicating an ongoing project, but the city has deemed the structure unsafe.
“The building owners have been trying to work to bring this building up to par, but it got to a point where the engineers said no more, we gotta get everybody out immediately,” City Manager Arthur H. Sorey III said.
One resident shared a video of the back of the building near the pool where she pointed out large cracks in the ground.
“It’s devastating because knowing what happened in Surfside, it’s like you guys should have taken the measures to kind of give us a good enough amount of time to move out, not where we only have a few hours to get all of our belongings,” Gomez said.
The residents say they were offered $150 for three nights’ stay in a hotel, April’s rent, and their security deposit if they signed a lease termination document provided to them by the building, but residents say they were advised not to sign anything just yet.