Florida's Flooded Future: "Retreat While There's Still Time"

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Miami is not viewing climate change just as a future threat; its effects are already part of daily life. Florida, former swampland that is just above sea level, is the US state at greatest risk from increasingly regular floods. The sea is rising faster here than anywhere else, and “king tides,” huge surges in autumn, are especially destructive. Drain outlets are below high-tide level during the surges, so salt water enters the drainage system and bubbles up from storm drains, submerging roads and underground parking lots for days. In 2016 a photograph of an octopus washed up in a Miami Beach car park gained widespread attention. This recent surge phenomenon is called “sunny day flooding,” because it happens even when there is no rain. In some parts of the Florida Keys, the archipelago south of Miami, the 2019 floods lasted an unprecedented 90 days.

There’s another, geological, problem: Miami, unlike other coastal cities such as New York and New Orleans, stands on a bed of silt that acts like a sponge, so the encroaching sea also gets into freshwater aquifers and septic tanks. The ever-higher seawalls erected by the city can do nothing to stop this, and in Hallandale Beach, seawater has already contaminated five freshwater wells. So Floridians may run out of drinking water even before they confront flooding. Encroaching salt water also threatens salt-intolerant vegetation, particularly the palm trees, which provide precious shade. Rising sea temperatures are already making this tropical region’s regular hurricanes longer and more destructive, as demonstrated by Hurricane Irma in 2017.

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Stoddard is not the only one recommending departure. Wealth management adviser Marc Singer encourages his clients, in more guarded terms, to “limit their exposure.” “Your house used to be your safest investment, but not any more. Climate change isn’t cyclical like the stock market, unless we’re prepared to wait for the next Ice Age.” He remembers the first time he saw sunny day flooding: “Developers who build on the seafront have a three-to-four-year horizon, but I have a long-term relationship with my clients, and they’re starting to worry about rising sea levels. Sooner or later, insurers are going to drastically increase premiums, banks won’t want to lend over 30 years, and people won’t be able to sell their homes.”

People have noticed, however, that the ground is slightly higher a few miles from the sea. West Coconut Grove is a world away from touristy Miami Beach. In this residential district, originally home to immigrants from the Bahamas, the highest point is about 10 feet above sea level. That may seem insignificant, but it’s a critical advantage over Miami Beach, where most of the land is just two to four feet above the sea. West Coconut Grove’s wooden houses, built in the shotgun style (with rooms arranged one behind the other) typical of the Caribbean, have no sea view, but they have never flooded. The Reverend Nathaniel Robinson, pastor of the local Greater St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church, praises the durability of these narrow single-story dwellings that can withstand hurricanes: “You just have to open the doors and windows and the house breathes. The wind blows through, it doesn’t blow it down. That one even survived [Hurricane] Andrew in 1992,” he said proudly, pointing to a faded white shotgun. Can it survive the developers, though? “Realtors send letters and call every week, trying to get me to sell,” said Thaddeus Scott, a semi-retired gardener in his 60s who has lived here since childhood. Ten years ago, he took on a 30-year mortgage for a house costing $130,000. He’s still there, but developers are buying up and demolishing homes all around his to build square white townhouses. He feels threatened by the encroachment of a hundred of these luxury “sugar cubes” that dwarf the existing homes: “These new houses cost $2 million. They’re not for people like us.”

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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/florida-flooding-miami/