The Engineer Behind The
Standard.

§553.899, Florida Statutes sets the milestone inspection. A building's certificate of occupancy starts the clock, and the inspection repeats every ten years after the first one. §718.112(2)(g) sets a separate obligation, the structural integrity reserve study, on its own ten-year cycle tied to when the condominium was created. Between them, the state has decided that a great many South Florida buildings will be examined by a licensed engineer, on a schedule, whether anyone suspects a problem or not.

What the statute does not do, and cannot do, is say how carefully.

That is the gap Fortis BuildSafe Solutions was built to stand in.

Gabor I. Nagy, PE is the founder of Fortis. He has been licensed as a professional engineer in Florida since September 2017, in the civil discipline. In October 2023 the state recognized him as a Florida Board Recognized Structural Engineer. In January 2024 he added the qualification covering the 8th Edition of the Florida Building Code.

All of it is public record, verifiable through the state's licensee database. The Fortis website links to that database rather than asking anyone to take our word for it, which is roughly the point.

None of that, though, is the interesting part.

Passion is usually a word about enthusiasm. In engineering it means something narrower and considerably less comfortable.

It means going back up to the roof because the first set of photographs did not actually settle the question. It means writing “undetermined, further investigation required” in a report when that is the honest answer, and then doing the further investigation. It means letting the evidence set the conclusion rather than the schedule, the budget, or what the client was hoping to hear.

It is unglamorous, and it is the entire job.

It is also what Fortis screens for in the people it hires. Every field inspector candidate is asked about a time they found something on a site they were not sure about. The answer that scores well is not the one where they figured it out on the spot. It is the one where they wrote it down as uncertain, and asked.

Asked what pulled him into engineering, the founder puts it this way:

I am wired to chase the exact force that bent a beam, the precise sequence that brought a structure down. It is not that I like puzzles. I need the kind of work where every calculation is a reconstruction of reality, where attention to the smallest detail separates a clean diagnosis from a catastrophic miss, and where the satisfaction comes from standing inside the physics until the failure tells its story. That is what pulled me into engineering. Not the title. The chance to turn raw evidence into something a board can act on, through relentless precision.

Most engineering careers point at new construction. There is more of it, it pays predictably, and the problem starts from intent: someone decides what the building should be, and the engineer makes it stand.

Fortis points the other way. It is a forensic engineering firm. It determines what an existing building is actually doing, why, and what happens next. It does not design new construction, and that is a choice rather than a limitation.

Existing buildings are the harder diagnostic problem by a wide margin. An assessment starts from decades of weather and salt air, repairs of unknown quality by unknown hands, drawings that may not match what was actually built, and a board of volunteers who need an answer they can defend to their neighbors. There is no design intent to fall back on. There is only evidence, and how hard you are willing to work to get it.

Choosing that work on purpose says something about what a person finds genuinely interesting.

The motto Fortis works under is Every Building. Every Engineer. The Fortis Standard. The middle phrase is the demanding one.

A standard that only holds when the founder is in the room is not a standard. It is a personality, and it leaves with him. So the Fortis approach is written down, trained to, and sealed against one documented method, and the test applied to anything the firm produces is simple: would this still be true if a different Fortis engineer had performed the work?

That is a harder practice to build. It requires documenting judgment that most firms keep in one person's head, and it means the founder's real work is not any single assessment. It is making sure the standard survives being handed to someone else.

Every assessment produces a document, and that document is what a board actually acts on. It decides what gets repaired first, what the reserves have to cover, and what the next ten years of a building's life look like.

Boards are not engineers. They are volunteers who are handed technical findings and then asked to commit other people's money on the strength of them. The quality of that document is the quality of that decision.

Thousands of buildings across Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach are moving through these cycles. Raise the clarity and rigor of the documents going to those boards and you have raised the quality of thousands of decisions that follow. Not through alarm, and not through volume. Through the repeatable discipline of one standard, applied the same way every time, on a building nobody is worried about yet.

That is the whole proposition, and it is why the sentence Fortis stands behind is a modest one: every Fortis assessment is performed to one documented standard and sealed by a licensed Florida PE who exercised direct responsible charge.