'Shaking all the time:' Surfside condo owners complained of luxury tower being built next door

Two and a half years before her building collapsed into a pile of rubble, Champlain Towers South resident Mara Chouela dashed off the latest in a string of angry complaints about the development project next door.

"We are concerned that the construction next to Surfside is too close," Chouela, a board member of the condo association, wrote in a January 2019 email to a building official in her Florida town. Workers were "digging too close to our property and we have concerns regarding the structure of our building," she wrote, attaching photos of construction equipment directly across from her building's property wall. Just 28 minutes later, the official, Rosendo Prieto, responded that "there is nothing for me to check." The reason why: The offending development, an ultra-luxury tower known as Eighty Seven Park, was directly across the border separating the town of Surfside from the city of Miami Beach, which runs between the two buildings.