If you don’t look carefully, you could easily miss the cameras set up outside schools. They, however, are watching you, and if you’re going at least 10 miles over the speed limit, you will receive a $100 surprise in the mail. 

“If you don’t want to get one of those violations just stay within the speed limit, very simple,” said Village of Pinecrest Police Chief Jason Cohen. 

Pinecrest and South Miami were the first cities in South Florida to take advantage of a new state law allowing automated cameras to catch speeders in school zones. Since their systems went online in October, they’ve sent out about 7,400 citations in South Miami and about 5,800 in Pinecrest. 

“It’s too early to say from the data on the overall impact it’s going to have around the schools, but we believe it’s going to change peoples’ driving patterns, that they’re going to be cognizant that they’re near a school and they’re going to automatically slow down, that’s the goal,” Cohen said. 

Diane Gilmore has been a security monitor for decades at Palmetto Senior High School. She said she sees speeders fly past the school all the time as students are trying to cross the street, and she’s glad the cameras have been installed. 

“I think they did a good idea because a lot of times, they be going across the street, these cars don’t respect us at all, they come fast and I say it ain’t careful, somebody gonna end up getting killed,” Gilmore said. 

Students spilling out of school seem to appreciate the cameras. 

“I think it’s good, ‘cause it controls the drivers so the drivers don’t speed and especially in a school zone,” said Nicholas Henriquez, a senior at Palmetto who drives to school. 

Not everyone agrees. Christian Gutierrez picks up a student regularly and he’s not impressed with the cameras’ impact. 

“Even speedbumps, I feel like, stops speeding,” Gutierrez said. “More than the cameras, yeah, for sure.”

The school zone cameras operate only on school days, starting a half hour before school starts and ending a half hour after school ends, no matter what the speed limit is during those hours. The police departments make $39 for each citation issued. 

“But I think it’s important to highlight that the funds coming in have to be used for public safety,” Chief Cohen said. “Anything that can help make our city safer, especially around the children and the schools, we looked at it as a win.”

Soon, police departments in Miami Gardens, West Miami, Davie and Plantation will be starting up their own school zone camera systems. Miami-Dade Police have also installed cameras outside eleven schools with many more to follow. Cohen predicts almost all South Florida police departments will join the trend.

A team of mechanical, architectural and environmental engineers, geoscientists, and geoinformation specialists affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and Germany has found that many of the tall, heavy buildings along the coast of South Florida are sinking into the ground much faster than was expected.

In their study published in the journal Earth and Space Science, the group compared satellite images over several years to learn more about ongoing subsidence along multiple beachfronts.

Prior research has shown that many factors can lead to subsidence, in which the altitude of a given parcel of land declines. Natural causes include water movement, earthquakes and gravity. Manmade causes include the heaviness of the built environment, including large buildings, and activities including fracking and landscaping.

In this new study, the researchers noted that the many tall buildings along many parts of the coast in South Florida appeared to be extremely heavy. They wondered if adding so much weight might be causing the ground beneath them to sink.

To find out, the researchers obtained precise satellite imagery for several of the most popular beaches in South Florida and compared 35 buildings standing on them over time. Modern satellite imagery is so precise it can detect changes in altitude of just a few centimeters. The researchers found that every one of the buildings they measured was sinking, ranging from 2 to 8 cm over the years 2016 to 2023, and that most of them were sinking faster than expected.

The research team also found that there were differences in subsidence between beach areas. The worst, for example, was occurring on Sunny Isles Beach; after that was Surfside, site of the collapse of a 12-story building back in 2021. Miami Beach, they noted, was experiencing the least amount of subsidence.

Because of the building collapse three years ago, the researchers took a closer look at Surfside to find out if subsidence may have been a contributing cause and found no evidence. Even if the building had been sinking, they note, it should not have led to structural damage unless it was sinking unevenly, with one part of the ground under the building sinking faster than another.

They suggest more work is required to determine if that is happening to any of the buildings in South Florida, and if so, to warn their owners.

© 2024 Science X Network

Former Rep. David Rivera, R-Fla., was indicted Tuesday on charges that he violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act and laundered funds in order to “conceal and promote his criminal conduct,” the Justice Department said on Wednesday. 

In the indictment, Rivera is accused of working “as an agent” of Raul Gorrín Belisario, a Venezuelan national who the Treasury Department said played a role in a “corruption scheme” to bribe the national treasurer of Venezuela. 

Rivera “sought to lobby senior U.S. government officials” on Gorrín’s behalf, attempting to have Gorrín removed from a list he was placed on because of the alleged bribery, according to the indictment returned by the grand jury.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), anyone who has agreed to work in a certain capacity for a foreign government’s interest, either through the government itself or an intermediary, must register with the U.S. government. 

The indictment also alleges that Rivera created shell companies “to conceal and promote his crimes.” The alleged scheme took place in 2019 and 2020, according to the indictment.

The FBI Miami Field Office, which the DOJ said is investigating the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday night. An attorney for Rivera also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  

Rivera was previously arrested and indicted in 2022. Prosecutors alleged in that case that Rivera tried to “act and cause others to act in the United States as an agent of a foreign principal,” referring to the Venezuelan government, without registering with the U.S. government. 

The Miami Herald reported on Wednesday that Rivera in a statement referred to the various FARA allegations as “false,” arguing that Tuesday’s indictment was “just another politicized indictment against a Republican, right before the Trump administration brings back sanity and fairness to this weaponization of the justice system.”

Rivera served in Congress from 2011 to 2013.