Take It To The Board with Donna DiMaggio Berger
Take It To The Board with Donna DiMaggio Berger
From Crisis to Compliance-- An Engineer's Explanation of Milestone Inspections and SIRS in Florida Condos
In this special episode of Take It To The Board, the podcast hits the road for its first-ever live taping at the Cooperator Trade Show & Expo in Fort Lauderdale. Host Donna DiMaggio Berger is joined by professional engineer Evan Swaysland, president of Swaysland Professional Engineering Consultants, for a clear-eyed discussion of Florida’s mandatory milestone inspections and Structural Integrity Reserve Studies (SIRS)—and what they really mean for the safety and longevity of multifamily buildings.
Donna and Evan break down the shift from visual inspections to comprehensive, post-Surfside evaluations, explaining why many aging buildings trigger Phase Two inspections and what “immediate” repairs look like in real-world practice. They unpack common trouble spots like balconies, waterproofing systems, and incidental damage during restoration, while offering practical guidance on reading inspection reports, budgeting with SIRS, and moving efficiently from inspections to repairs.
The conversation also explores emerging issues, including coastal subsidence research, construction-related vibration risks, and how monitoring and documentation can protect both buildings and legal interests. Listeners will learn how to hire the right engineer, scope projects intelligently, and focus on preventive maintenance—not just reactive fixes.
Conversation Highlights:
- How the industry has shifted from viewing inspections as a reactive measure to embracing a more preventative and predictive model of building safety
- The top three misconceptions boards or residents commonly have about structural inspections
- The first structural conditions an engineer typically evaluates, and what signals whether a building has been well maintained or neglected
- Warning signs that require monitoring, and urgent conditions that rise to the level of life safety concerns
- The typical cost range for a Milestone Inspection, and which factors most significantly influence that cost (i.e. building size, age, location, and structural complexity)
- What does a high-quality Milestone Inspection involve that most directors or unit owners may not fully appreciate?
- Differences between a Milestone Inspection and a SIRS
- Are the current Milestone Inspection and SIRS frameworks adequate to identify subsidence-related risks, or do policies and protocols need to evolve?
- Key differences between “settling,” “sinking,” and “sinkholes” from an engineering perspective
- Early signs of subsidence or sinkhole activity and what remediation typically involves
- How volunteer boards can become better, more informed consumers when selecting an engineering firm
- BONUS: If there is one essential truth about structural safety every Florida board should understand, what is it?
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Hi everyone, I'm attorney Donna DiMaggio Berger, and this is Take It to the Board, where we speak condo and HOA. Good morning, Cooperator Expo. I'm Donna DiMaggio Berger and welcome to a very special live edition of Take It to the Board, where we turn community association chaos into clarity. Today we're stepping out from behind the microphone and into the heart of the Cooperator Trade Show to talk about something that affects every condominium, cooperative, and every high-rise in Florida and beyond. And that's the structural integrity of the buildings millions of people call home. Joining me is someone who lives and breathes these questions. Professional engineer Evan Swazeland, the president of Swazlin Professional Engineering Consultants. Evan holds advanced certifications from the American Concrete Institute and the Posttensioning Institute. He is an expert in the repair of existing concrete structures as well as waterproofing materials, painting and sealing, and is a former chapter president of the local international concrete repair institute. That's a lot, Evan. Evan's work puts him on the front lines of inspections, building evaluations, and the critical decisions that keep our communities safe. In an era shaped by new legislation, heightened owner anxiety, and the lasting shadow of the surfside tragedy, engineering inspections are no longer routine, they're existential. So today in our first ever live taping, we're pulling back the curtain on what it truly takes to ensure a building is structurally sound and what boards, managers, and residents absolutely must understand. Evan, thank you for joining us for this landmark episode.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00:So, Evan, for those here at the expo, and for our people who are going to be listening to this episode when we release it, they may not realize how dramatically your world has changed in the last few years. Can you start by describing why engineering inspections have become such a central component of keeping Florida's multifamily housing stock safe?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So obviously in the summer of 2021, there was a catastrophe down in surfside. And it would have been shameful for us as a society not to be reactive to that. So what had changed? Initially, there was uh an immediate reaction from a lot of uncertainty and knowing, well, what happened? How can we prevent that from happening to ourselves? So, you know, between 2021 and 2022, uh, there was uh kind of an immediacy. And I remember if you Miami Dade County, just every building of a certain age, you needed to do an inspection no matter if you just did your recertification or not. That just came out immediately. And then when 22 passed, they kind of expanded it now where originally it was at Senate law, Senate Bill 4D, and then it got moved into the milestone law, and then the SERS law subsequent to that, you know, kind of made these mandated inspections become a reality for everybody across the state. And us as engineers and and knowing that we were already at capacity with our current look workload, we're going, well, who's gonna do this?
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And so we had actually a lot of firms came in from out of state, um, a lot of new firms started popping up, and then the ones that were already established, like ourselves, we were just have been pretty much at max capacity from uh I would say 2021 till now, and it doesn't appear that it's slowing down anytime soon.
SPEAKER_00:You've become like accountants in tax season, but year round.
SPEAKER_01:So you're gonna get your notifications from your building officials, you know, the first quarter of the year, and then it kind of goes from there in terms of what you need to do. So there was a a large, you know, a large chunk of these other buildings that Dade and Broward, we've been kind of used to this. You know, Dade enacted their safety inspections going back in the 70s, Broward, the early 2000s. So we had been kind of used to this because that's where our business is. It's now more of, well, the rest of the state starting to catch up to what we've been doing.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I'm so glad you mentioned that because I've always wanted to ask for decades, engineering, structural engineering was really kind of reactive rather than proactive. So something came up, you looked around, you saw that there were concrete stucco issues, there were cracks. There were only two counties, two out of sixty-seven Florida counties, you mentioned them, Broward and Miami Dade, that required older multifamily buildings to be inspected. What was going on with the other sixty-five counties? Don't they have older buildings?
SPEAKER_01:They do. It just happened to be that the concentration of those buildings were in Dade and Broward counties. And even Dade and Broward, the inspections were just supposed to start when the buildings turned 40 years old. I will tell you, if you start looking at buildings when they turn 40, you're already about 20 years behind when you could have been really um in a preventative cycle versus a repair cycle. So that should always be the goal is we want to prevent things from getting to a catastrophic point, but even earlier than that, we need to be preventative in having to do these large-scale repair projects. So realistically, this now at this 25 years, you know, it was 30 years, now 25 if you're a certain distance from the coastline, that's a really good target date and something that the industry has been preaching since all this stuff came out 20, 30 years ago.
SPEAKER_00:You know, I've said it before on the podcast that a lot of people bought their little slice of paradise in Florida, particularly multifamily buildings along the coastline. And it was really marketed to them by real estate agents and developers as turnkey. Right. You don't have you coming from the big house in the northeast, you don't have the lawn, the snow, the whatever. All you need to do is you got your key, you go in. But that's not really the case. They're owners of the common elements as well. And now the bills kind of come and do. So I guess one of the questions I also have is like, what are the top three misperceptions that owners and boards have about the role preventative maintenance plays?
SPEAKER_01:So particularly with the reports, you write the report, you do the inspection, you're now presenting it to the board, and it becomes a negotiation of what we're gonna do and what we're not gonna do. Well, you gotta do this. Now, if you want to do extra protection, that's gonna be X, Y, Z extra. But you need to do ABC in order for you to pass this inspection.
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's let me just stop you there. So that's not Evan saying that. That's the state saying So what are those things, Evan? What are the mandatory traditionally?
SPEAKER_01:It's always been life safety issues, part of structural concern. There's a definition, it's substantial structural deterioration, basically anything that negatively affects the framing system of the building. That needs to get done. Now, if you're in Dayton Broward, there's also electrical components that you need to look at. Those are, again, life safety issues needs to get done. Now, there's other things you can do that would prolong the repair, prolong how often you need to do this, such as waterproofing, uh protective coatings, things of that nature. So those are things you need to do in addition, but minimally it's always been the life safety issues you need to address.
SPEAKER_00:What about roof?
SPEAKER_01:Now, roofs are a little bit trickier because it might not be a life safety issue, right?
SPEAKER_00:But unless you live in the penthouse.
SPEAKER_01:Unless you live in the penthouse and then you have water damage and the water is getting into your slab and affecting your structural elements. Well, that's something different. But if you have you know an expected roofing life of three to five years, that's not something that you need to do right now. But you still need to budget for it, which is the second component of all those laws that was passed. So that's the structural integrity reserve studies. So, you know, one of them is an inspection to tell you what you need to do. That's the milestone, or if I'm in Dayton Broward, I'm gonna call it a safety certification inspection. And then there's the structural integrity reserve study, which is more of a financial planning tool in order to make sure you have the money to be able to repair those things that mandate that we mandate that you need to do.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm finding with a lot of clients, they are using those terms interchangeably. Like they'll say my bylaws, but they're really talking about all of the governing documents, and now they're saying SERS. Right. But SERS is the structural integrity study, which is done by reserve companies, ostensibly in connection with engineers. It's telling you how to fund it, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's telling you how to fund it. So originally, when they um were coming up with that legislation, you did need to have an engineer that was going to inspect all those components. So those are your structural framing system, your exterior cladding systems, windows, doors, painting, roofs, waterproofing of exposed slabs, but it also keyed in on fire safety elements, life safety elements, electrical systems, and mechanical systems. So originally an engineer was supposed to do all that. They did that kind of that makeup bill and whatever, and so that also now allows reserve companies to go in and do what they've traditionally always done as part of their reserve analysis. But what they usually do is they'll take what us as the structural engineer prepare for the milestone or for your research or any inspection reports we do and incorporate that into what their service life estimates are. And those service life estimates are what gets you how much you need to reserve for what that might cost in terms of uh repair or replacement at that time X when you need to do it.
SPEAKER_00:So hopefully none of our listeners did the SIRS and think they're done at just the SERS level.
SPEAKER_01:And that's also part of it, right? You're going to have to do continual maintenance and repair for as long as the buildings exist. Now, with global climate change and sea level rise, we may all be taking canoes to work here soon. So that might not be that long. But you know, the reality is as long as those buildings are maintained and are habitable, you have to do maintenance and repairs. And how do you budget for that? And how do you make that so they're as far apart as possible for your capital expenses? That's one of the most important things.
SPEAKER_00:I don't want to categorize the extras as bells and whistles because they're really not. But let's say you walk in and you go, you know, we should really look at the elevators in the seawall as well, and maybe other components. How often do you get pushback and how often does the board say, Yeah, absolutely, we want to we want to do everything?
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell So from our end, as structural engineers, our profession was held in very high regard from the summer of 2021, maybe till about the first or second quarter of 2022, and then it went and got back to how it was before, where you can do a Google search and its AI will tell you all you need to know, and you won't trust the person that went to school for five years and took four years before they had to take a test. So I think that's just the reality of human nature. But the main things we get pushback on, particularly high-rise buildings and even low rise buildings, is what do we do with the exterior finishes? So that's I've had I installed tile on my balcony 25 years ago. It means so much to me, and I can't take it off. Well, how are we gonna fix the problems? How are we gonna protect your slab? I'm sorry you got your useful life out of that. You need to take it off. So those are the things we always get pushback on. It's always flooring, hurricane shutters, and that's always the two main things with exterior repair projects.
SPEAKER_00:Let's talk about the flooring. So I get that a lot. So I want it to look beautiful, I want my family, my living room to flow into the outdoor balconies. I've got this gorgeous marble. I know, I I understand. I'm very picky about aesthetics as well, but I have not yet spoken to an engineer who has just completed a concrete restoration project where they didn't say go with a stamped concrete or painted concrete. Do not allow somebody to reinstall flooring on those balconies. But if you absolutely must, you have to have very comprehensive construction protocol in place in terms of who they're using to install, that they're doing the proper waterproofing. 100%. And every yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so same thing. Tile hides damage. Uh, we want to see it. We want to be able to do our inspection, even GPR, some more advanced non-destructive techniques, tile interferes with that in some capacity. So, what you you want to do is you want to remove it, put a nice protective coating on it, something that is also aesthetically pleasing. Uh as much as possible.
SPEAKER_00:As much as possible.
SPEAKER_01:They make some nice systems, but no, it's not Italian marble. Like we get that. But what that does is it's a really thin layer, so you're allows you to see the spalls and the deterioration on the slabs, so that way you can fix it, and then also tie in whatever the replacement coating is better than you could tie in tile. Biggest problem we have also is at least with cantilever balcony slabs, a lot of times those repairs go to the interior of the units, and then how do we match our interior tile that we had to remove? And that's always our worst case scenario during these repair processes. Explaining to people, I have to remove your door, I have to put it in a temporary wall, we're gonna remove the flooring. By the way, your neighbor's affected, you're affected, and underneath's affected, and there's a systematic way we have to do this, so this wall is gonna be here for months at a time.
SPEAKER_00:And people are always so cooperative during these projects.
SPEAKER_01:Never.
SPEAKER_00:That's a topic for a whole different episode on incidental damage. That's where someone like me comes in as association counsel to confirm whether or not the documents have an incidental damage clause, what that means. What it doesn't mean is that the association now steps into the shoes of an insurance company and you get brand new flooring everywhere. That's uh I've been dealing with that recently. But Evan, let's say you walk into a 30, 40, or 50-year-old building, okay? What are the first things that catch your eye that tell you this building's been well maintained or it's been neglected?
SPEAKER_01:The first thing that tells us it's been well maintained is documentation. If you go into an association and they clearly can tell you when the last time they did X, Y, Z, and here are all the files for it. Here are the pay apps, the Asvilse, this is what the scope of work was, these are all of original plans. We had them digitized so we can send them to vendors and stuff like that. Then we know I can believe the information they're telling me about repairs. If it's just, no, those are the plans or in a corner. I haven't even looked in that closet, and you're going, okay, building departments don't have your records most of the time. So you need to be responsible for maintaining your records. We've even had clients where we worked for them 15 years ago, and they don't have anything that we prepared, and we know we gave it to them and broke it down, and even if it was prior to uh putting everything on the cloud, we have gave them CDs full of information and they don't have it anymore. And like, do you have it anymore? It's like, no, I delete my records and well now every seven years.
SPEAKER_00:So I am gonna give a shout out to a prior podcast guest, Trish of Indocs, and she came on, and this was exactly what she was talking about is helping associations maintain their maintenance records. And Trish actually is in Australia, so she was taping at 4 a.m. her time. Um dedication. So she's definitely warranting uh a shout out. So can you, in as concise a manner as possible, walk us through the difference between like just looking at, okay, this is pretty much regular wear and tear as opposed to like an urgent condition where you say to the client, you need immediate shoring here. You need immediate and by I want you to also explain what immediate means, that it doesn't mean six months from now you you shore it up.
SPEAKER_01:So the main things we're looking for as engineers, and and this is all from experience and training, primarily experience, you have to see it. It's certain types of cracking, certain types of cracking and exposed rebar, exposed reinforcement that is indicative of primarily shear failures, that can be a catastrophic failure.
SPEAKER_00:What's a shear failure?
SPEAKER_01:So shear is like wind shear? Yeah, so shear would be just a sudden drop of a structural element. So when we say shear, primarily a connection of like the slab to the top of a column or a joist attached to a beam, something like that, where if it were to fail instantaneously, you could have loss of life. So that that is the failure mechanism of surfside. So that type of mechanism is of critical importance. Other things would be certain types of flexural cracking, hard to explain without visual representation, but those are things that we're trained to do and from experience know what's important. From you all as association members, like you're not trained to do that. So it's more of a if I see something, say something, say something to your manager, say something to your maintenance person, let them compile these lists, send an email, send a picture to an engineer you work with, or if not, find somebody that can just say, I'm gonna look at that, and then if we're competent, we should be able to get out there pretty quickly and make an intermination.
SPEAKER_00:I love to see something say something. So now when I go to a parking garage, whether it's the mall, wherever it is, I look up and I'm thinking, oh my god, I mean, you can see exposed rebar, you can see chunks of concrete. That's me at a why are there so few people that are looking up when they're in concrete structures?
SPEAKER_01:Right. So that's that's me when I go to Disney World with my kids. I'm looking around at everything inside instead of you know enjoying the rides. But any exposed rebar that that needs to be brought to people's attention.
SPEAKER_00:And I've actually had a unit owner say to me at a meeting, that's just aesthetic. Literally, there were chunks of concrete. It's not just aesthetic.
SPEAKER_01:It's not. So concrete cracks. Okay? Most of our structures down here are reinforced concrete. It cracks. There's a difference in the types of cracks. If you see any exposed metal, corroded metal, well, that's a different animal and that needs to get evaluated by a professional. If we tell you you need to put a shoring up immediately, you also hear this word immediately, but also in an abundance of caution, which means we don't think it's going to fail tomorrow, but there is a likelihood that's going to fail at some point in the future. So when we say immediately, for at least from our perspective, we'll work with getting a general contract out there either that day or within the next day to two days. I will say we have a good lessons learned. We were working at a project in Jupiter, Florida, post-tension building, and for some reason the way the workflow worked was that they were doing some exploratory work Friday afternoon. And the contractor that was doing the exploratory work found out that we had a critical situation where none of the slabs were properly stressed, hence they didn't have anything to support them. So at Friday at 4 o'clock, you know, we had to make the decision that we needed to shore up about five floors of this building in order to avoid something very significant from happening. So our lessons learned was maybe don't do the exploratory on a Friday afternoon so it kills everybody's weekend in terms of doing the shoring.
SPEAKER_00:That makes sense. I mean, listen, you don't need a whole building to fall down to have a tragedy. One balcony falling off with a person on it is a tragedy. Well, let me ask you those reports. So I've looked at a few and you've got the categories. Tell us the categories, because I know fair and poor are two of the categories.
SPEAKER_01:I don't even know them offhand because I I don't think that's really worded very well for what for what people look for.
SPEAKER_00:What's fair? Like is that good?
SPEAKER_01:Right. So I can look at a balcony and there's one small repair. So ninety eight percent of it's in great condition. Condition. Right. But that one small repair needs to get done. Does that make everything poor?
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So it's really up to your discretion. I would say most of the time, most of the buildings we look at, very few, most of them are fair, that have some areas of poor elements. Okay, there's nothing that has been ever been good or exceptional. Most everything needs some level of work done in some capacity.
SPEAKER_00:Have you ever I know engineers have the ability to call for the evacuation of a building. Have you ever had to do that?
SPEAKER_01:I did that most recently. It was right after Champlain Towers. It was at a hotel, an old hotel in Hollywood. We had been asked to do an inspection as they were changing owners. And I just went on site to be able to give them a proposal to do that. And I walked, it had an indoor swimming pool. So you can imagine pools, a lot of chlorine. Chlorine's not good for metals. And I thought the entire building should be evacuated and condemned. So I immediately notified the building official in Hollywood, and it took them 72 hours to get back to me. Wow. So I don't want to be smirched building officials, but there needs to be a better way that this stuff gets done. I will say they all have improved, particularly with reviewing permits and making sure that contractors, engineers, special inspectors are submitting what they need to do. Um, but that one just kind of threw me for a loop. But that was the only building where we actually in the last maybe ten years where we we thought we had a major situation happening.
SPEAKER_00:Well it's interesting you brought up I I thought about this. Should we be asking the front desk clerk at hotels to see their structural reports when we check in?
SPEAKER_01:You might.
SPEAKER_00:I see. You're confirming one of my fears.
SPEAKER_01:I remember going to uh a wedding in in Vero Beach, and we were staying at a little two-story bungalow hotel, and I walked outside on the catwalks, and I was like, this is not good. So now it was probably about 15 years ago, so I don't know what they've done.
SPEAKER_00:Well, hopefully they are applying as stringent standards to our hotel and motel industry as they are to private residential communities because it it it all impacts potentially our lives.
SPEAKER_01:Their level of inspection is has traditionally not been the same. It's been slightly, slightly less.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Slightly less. Okay. Probably good lobbyists. I'll just say that. So everything boils down to because I get asked this all the time, how much is this gonna cost? We're not talking about the repairs, but we're talking about the milestone inspection. What could like a seven-story high-rise building expect?
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell So we made a a concerted effort after Champlain Towers, and this isn't making light of the previous recertification inspections, but it was it really was a cursory inspection. You would go in and it was just a visual, use a 10 or 25 percent representative of the building to get a feel for everything. And what we've subsequently done is saying, well, we don't want to do that anymore. We don't want to be responsible if something happens, we want to look at everything. So we we really do go 100% through the units. So if you have balcony slabs, we're going into every single unit. Um, and then also you know, depends on the size of the parking garage, how big are the balconies, everything like that.
SPEAKER_00:So wait, I just want you go into every unit because I have heard of associations saying we only want you to go into 20, and only these 20.
SPEAKER_01:No, so we we purposely don't want to do that. We want to go to good cross-section because what that helps us do is you know there's a phase one and there's a phase two with these things. So if we feel comfortable that we've done a complete inspection, that phase two inspection becomes significantly less work. I will tell you if you're a 30-year-old building in Florida on the coast, unless you've been meticulous in terms of your repair and protection, there will be something that needs to be repaired. And it's a pass fail. Even if there's one thing, it's repairs required, and you failed, move you to the next, the phase two inspection. The real issue that we're seeing is like how do we get from the inspection to actually completing the repair? So that's you know, a competent engineer preparing plans and specifications for the repair that makes sense. Yeah. That contractors can follow, get competitive bids, you know, that's what is that next step. So that's the purpose of doing this initial inspection. But if you're talking about what costs look like, really depending on the size of the building, but you know, at least for us for a milestone, like minimum cost for a small building, 5,000, all the way up to maybe 50,000, 60,000, depending on the size of the project.
SPEAKER_00:Location, I imagine coastal is 100%. Yeah. Well, okay. Swazlin goes out, they do a very thorough, they go into every unit, every balcony, what have you. Board says, oh, this is this is uh a lot more grim than we thought it would be. They now want a peer review. Uh-huh. And normally as an attorney, I'll say a peer review should be you're out there, you want something more robust. You think, oh, maybe this engineer has overlooked a few things. We want not less, but I I fear that there are some associations looking for peer reviews that are less robust, maybe go into fewer things, find fewer problems. Tell us how that works, because isn't your first report submitted to the building department?
SPEAKER_01:It is. What sometimes happens is you know, we now need to submit it ourselves. Before it was provided to the owners, they would submit it, sometimes not submit it, just got lost in the shuffle. I thought you were gonna do it. Well, no. So now that's all been put back on the engineer to do the submittals, which we do. So if you do want to peer review, what can happen is that your new engineer could submit their own report and then it would supersede what we had submitted. Some building officials are accepting that. They'll usually do their own evaluation, walk around to see what makes sense. But that does happen.
SPEAKER_00:So is it the last one in though? You would think if a building official got a very comprehensive engineering report and then they got another one that's called that's vastly different in terms of the condition of the property and the cost to repair.
SPEAKER_01:Are you saying they're just gonna go a lot of it depends on the municipality and the specific building official.
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:It works both ways. So we've have clients and it's not necessarily the board of directors we're working with. Maybe it's a group that just doesn't want to do it, and they'll issue their own report and say, well, he's saying too much damage or specifying too much work. They'll get somebody else in, and I I feel perfectly fine for my life if I tell you that you needed to do more work, and if you went to somebody else and it happens, I know I did what I was supposed to do.
SPEAKER_00:I guess this is when my phone rings, Evan, and they say, This is what's going on. What do you recommend? We want a legal opinion. Because at the end of the day, directors, they are fiduciaries. Maybe that little maybe that little dissident group, they feel that they have more And they're not. And they're not. So it's uh it's a whole different ballgame. So I wanted to bring up to you the Miami Herald's December 1st, 2025 article on subsidence, the gradual sinking or shifting of land beneath Florida's coastal buildings. I think the University of Miami study found 35 buildings from Miami Beach to Sunny Isles Beach sank up to 3.1 inches between 2016 and 2023. I should say I just got back from Mexico City.
SPEAKER_01:That was my example I was gonna use.
SPEAKER_00:That's so funny. So my husband and I just went to Mexico City, and they're sinking like eight inches a year, I think. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, significantly worse there.
SPEAKER_00:So but should we not be concerned about three point one inches that these buildings are sinking over several years?
SPEAKER_01:So one of the authors of the University of Miami study was Dr. Antonio Nani. Um he's uh former president of the American Concrete Institute. Uh, I've met him a few times personally, and I will say when he brings this up and writes a paper and says this is something that we should monitor and potentially be concerned about it, I would listen. Now, there isn't an answer. Um they don't know how severe it is, but this is something that should be monitored, and the eventual repair of that would be tremendously expensive. So I wouldn't even get into that yet. But it's more of this is something we noticed, and they're doing it through satellite imagery. So basically they have really high-resolution satellites that can tell the differential of what the height is. So that's where this is coming from. So it's just a matter of, well, we want to continue to do this to see what impacts it has. They're not saying that there's a problem yet, or you need to run through the side.
SPEAKER_00:They don't want to create mass panics.
SPEAKER_01:This is something that we're seeing and maybe something we can be concerned about. Now, the solution for this isn't uh individual building doing something. This is a mass-scale problem that would probably need to be solved in some sort of private public partnership. So that's just think about that. But just be educated, think about it, and listen to what you know these PhDs say because they University of Miami does a lot of really good work in terms of their um research, particularly in the concrete related industry.
SPEAKER_00:I had another podcast guest on who has the technology to to raise homes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Right? And he's doing it more for flooding. Right. But I asked, could you do this for a high-rise building? He thinks he said yes. They could. You you could. It could probably be super expensive. Well, let's talk about. Remember, we talked about those add-ons for the milestone inspection. So do you ever suggest a subsurface inspection?
SPEAKER_01:So typically no. So typically no. And this is related to really large deep foundation systems. So uh really large, this a lot of them have sunny aisles as the main buildings, and they're 40, 50 story buildings, and then they have uh deep pile foundations. So that's really what they're looking at. And when you go through the recertifications or the milestone inspections, um, there's a really small category relating to foundations. And what it's really keying you in on is if there's differential settlement. So those would mainly be problems for uh shallow foundation systems, map foundation systems, where if you do get movement in a corner or a certain side of the building, you'll see some cracking in the masonry walls or in your walls because that floor is sinking, everything else is staying still, so something needs to give. Traditionally, that's the jointing material between uh the walls and the structural elements. So that's what that's really keying in on. So deep foundation systems, high rises, large buildings, when they install those piles, it's constantly monitored and it's constantly evaluated as they do it. So you rarely see any problems with the foundations of deep foundation buildings. These buildings are sinking at the same gradual rate altogether.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So if I'm hearing you correctly, there's really no for the average person an early warning sign. No. You know, the whole goal of the legislation we've seen over the last few years, the mandatory reserve funding, the mandatory engineering inspections from time to time. Does that framework really take into account subsidence issues and sinkholes?
SPEAKER_01:No, because you're we live in Florida. We get to wake up, it's typically warm outside, and and maybe it's a short drive or walk to the beach. So we're blessed with being able to go out in the sun and do all that work. But we're right next to the ocean. Oceans have chlorides, chlorides infiltrate our structures, cause problems. So that's the typical failure mechanism of coastline structures is corrosion of the embedded reinforcement causes structural problems. So what you're inspecting is making sure that we're meeting the main things that can happen. Now, if you did inspect a high rise and you did see some sort of shifting or you're checking the plumness of columns and there is something off, that would lend you to an additional inspection. What we had found with the initial reaction after surfside, there was some, well, there was a building being built next door and it contributed to the foundation, and we've had buildings built two miles away. What does that do for us? And the simple answer is it didn't do anything to you, but what do you want us to do to give you some peace of mind? So, well, what can you do? It's like, well, we could rip out your garage floor, open up some of the areas, you could take a look at the pile cap, take a look at the tops of a couple piles, and take some photos and say to your resident, this is what we did, look at it, it looks great. Well, we knew it was going to be great before we did that. How do you really check some of these deep foundations? It's like Sub Echo Pulse uh technology that is gonna be tremendously expensive to institute, and there's not a crazy amount of firms that do that. These are large geotechnical firms that do this work.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I so wanted to ask you about the construction next door. Not the construction two miles away, but a lot of these older buildings, some of them are coming down, they're being terminated because of all the costs, and new ones are going up, and then you've got existing buildings, and let's say they're close because my these coastal areas, the construction was very dense. Um, what is the impact from an engineering standpoint? You know, obviously you can see if it's creating cracks in the foundation, and how long would damage take to manifest?
SPEAKER_01:So it should be fairly instant. So the main thing is when they're they're doing their foundation. Uh so that's the deep drilling, things like that. That's where you get most of the vibration, which is going to cause problems to your building. Uh, so that is gonna be pretty instant impact. When these buildings are being constructed, you know, there's usually construction monitoring not only on their building, but also on the neighboring property. So that's through vibration analysis, things like that. Uh, we're actually involved with a project where um F the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is doing beach renourishment and they're using one of our clients' land to bring all the sand on the beach. And they have conveyors and trucks running. So we're actually doing vibration monitoring and analysis for that property whose land they're doing. So it's that level of effort, and then if something does happen or something is out of whack, it's making sure you're made right. So that's where the attorneys come in into play. You know, you get your construction experts and who's paying you for that?
SPEAKER_00:The the existing can building saying come in, or is the developer of the company?
SPEAKER_01:The developer is in our in our case, we're being paid by our client who's being reimbursed by FDEP. So usually it's the developer that's doing that monitoring. Now you could go above and beyond, but then you might have to pay for that yourself just to give a peer review or a second opinion on that company.
SPEAKER_00:But I think that would be money well spent. If I'm living in an older building and something's going up next door, it's great, but I'm not sure I'm relying on the developer's engineer to tell me everything's okay.
SPEAKER_01:You should have your own pre and post inspection done and you should have monitoring done, particularly of buildings of large size.
SPEAKER_00:So that segues nicely into, you know, when we deal with 558 claims, which is construction defects, one of the things my partner, Steve Lester, always tells when we're meeting with a client is your most important decision is your engineer. Yes. That's your most important hiring decision right now. How do we help volunteer boards and management professionals become better consumers of engineering services? What question should they ask? What should they be looking for when they're interviewing engineers? And every and I say that, Evan, because everything's so commoditized. What does this cost? But beyond that, because to me, that's not the only yardstick, it's not even the best yardstick for measuring value. What should they be looking at when they're vetting engineers?
SPEAKER_01:So I think the most important thing is, and I don't want to say this because we've been around for over 35 years, but it's longevity in the industry and it's specific knowledge of what you're looking at doing. So, you know, our bread and butter has always been repair of existing structures. I know how to do that with my eyes closed, can look at a building and give you a pretty good rough estimate of what the order of magnitude of this thing is going to cost. So it's it's finding out longevity. It is a small industry in the reality of it. There's, you know, we've had a large influx of engineers and contractors, but it's really only a talent pool of maybe 25, 30 construction firms that do these large-scale restoration projects. And I certainly wouldn't say all of them are as good as everybody else. Um, in terms of engineers, again, it's a small pool. So you need to rely on not just the glowing references, ask for five current projects.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Don't ask for references from ten years ago where you've done a good job. Ask for five current projects. Talk to the board members for those buildings, talk to the property manager, you know, talk to the contractors. They'll tell you who's good. Talk to the engineers, they'll tell you who the contractors are good.
SPEAKER_00:And longstanding industry ties, community ties, because as you said at the outset of this episode, there's been such a demand for engineering services based on these new laws. We have had an influx, like we always have in the aftermath of a casualty, like a hurricane, too. And that's not to disparage companies coming in, but community ties are in place.
SPEAKER_01:No, there's after Hurricane Wilma, there had to, you know, hundreds of thousands of roofs needed to get done. There weren't enough companies in Florida to do that. So companies from out of state didn't they weren't all bad, some were, but they weren't all bad.
SPEAKER_00:So we're coming up on time, Evan. If you could wave a magic wand and require every board in Florida to understand one essential truth about structural safety, what would it be?
SPEAKER_01:That that initial inspection is not going to be a hundred percent of that's the work we find and that's the work we do. There is an uncovering process to all of this. We like to think that we're pretty thorough, but there's always an opportunity for these projects to grow and shrink, but primarily grow based on what you actually find when you're doing the excavation of the concrete or you're opening up the walls of an ethus building and you're seeing the condition of the of the steel studs. You know, there is an initial discovery phase of these types of projects, and these projects evolve. And no matter how competent the people that were doing the inspections were, the reality is that the projects change over time. And certainly ask the questions of why and expect to get reasonable and competent answers. And if you can't get those, well then then that's a problem.
SPEAKER_00:Where can people find you?
SPEAKER_01:So our website is www.swaislin.com. Uh my last name, it's impossible to s for people to spell, so it'll be there in the listing.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much, Evan. Really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us today. Don't forget to follow and rate us on your favorite podcast platform or visit take it to the board.com for more ways to connect.