Rising Waters

 

‘The water is coming’: Florida Keys faces stark reality as seas rise. As reported in the Guardian:

Officials prepare to elevate streets despite financial shortfalls, amid recognition that not every home can be saved

Oliver Milman

@olliemilman

Thu 24 Jun 2021 07.00 EDT

L

ong famed for its spectacular fishing, sprawling coral reefs and literary residents such as Ernest Hemingway, the Florida Keys is now acknowledging a previously unthinkable reality: it faces being overwhelmed by the rising seas and not every home can be saved.

Following a grueling seven-hour public meeting on Monday, held in the appropriately named city of Marathon, officials agreed to push ahead with a plan to elevate streets throughout the Keys to keep them from perpetual flooding, while admitting they do not have the money to do so.

The string of coral cay islands that unspool from the southern tip of Florida finds itself on the frontline of the climate crisis, forcing unenviable choices upon a place that styles itself as sunshine-drenched idyll. The lives of Keys residents – a mixture of wealthy, older white people, the one in four who are Hispanic or Latino, and those struggling in poverty – face being upended.

If the funding isn’t found, the Keys will become one of the first places in the US – and certainly not the last – to inform residents that certain areas will have to be surrendered to the oncoming tides.

“The water is coming and we can’t stop it,” said Michelle Coldiron, mayor of Monroe county, which encompasses the Keys. “Some homes will have to be elevated, some will have to be bought out. It’s very difficult to have these conversations with homeowners, because this is where they live. It can get very emotional.”

A town board meeting at the government building in Marathon, Florida on June 21, 2021. Photograph: Saul Martinez/The Guardian

Once people are unable to secure mortgages and insurance for soaked homes, the Keys will cease to be a livable place long before it’s fully underwater, according to Harold Wanless, a geographer at the University of Miami. “People don’t have a concept of what sea level rise will do to them. They just can’t conceive it,” he said.

On Monday, the county gave details of its plan to spend $1.8bn over the next 25 years to raise 150 miles of roads in the Keys, deploying a mixture of new drains, pump stations and vegetation to prevent the streets becoming inundated with seawater. The heightened roadways are eagerly anticipated by residents who told the meeting of cars being ruined by the salt water and of donning boots to wade to front doors.

“The roads are shot, they’re full of cracks, the water is permeating up,” said Kimberly Sikora, who lives in a vulnerable neighborhood of Key Largo called Stillwright Point that is still awaiting a full road elevation proposal. “I’m just looking for some kind of relief.”

Another resident, Robert Schaller of Twin Lakes, an area further along in the planning process, muttered that he “should’ve done my due diligence” when buying his house last year. “I literally stand on my balcony and watch the water come up through my street,” he said. “It’s coming up right through the pavement.”

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But Monroe county’s budget will not cover the raising of all the roads, nor any mass buyout of homes, and an appeal to Florida state lawmakers to levy a new tax to cover these mounting costs has been rebuffed. Further costs will pile up as the county grapples with how – and who pays - to keep critical infrastructure such as sewers and power substations, as well as people’s homes, from being flooded along with the roads.

“If we can’t raise additional money then we will have to look at prioritizing,” said Rhonda Haag, Monroe county’s chief resilience officer.

“For example, should we spend money on raising roads if people aren’t paying to raise their yards? We are blazing trails here. We are ahead of everyone in having to think about this.”

Homes on a canal that frequently gets flooded, in Key Largo on Monday. Photograph: Saul Martinez/The Guardian

The pancake-flat Keys are in jeopardy from rising seas that are, as a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) scientist told the county commissioners in the Monday meeting, accelerating upwards as the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt away. Human-caused global heating means an extra 17in of sea level rise by 2040, according to an intermediate Noaa projection used by the county.

Compounding this problem, the islands’ porous limestone allows the rising seawater to bubble up from below, meaning it just takes high tides on sunny days to turn roads into ponds, while global heating is also spurring fiercer hurricanes that can occasionally crunch into the archipelago.

“The Florida Keys are one of the most vulnerable places to flooding in North America,” said Kristina Hill, an environmental planner at the University of California, Berkeley, who warned that the islands would face growing road and pipe maintenance costs, more pollution leaks and harmful algal blooms.

“Without a change in strategy, parts of the Keys will become accessible only by boat,” said Hill, adding that the islands could have to resort to floating structures and navigable canals to remain viable. “The islands will gradually disappear into a higher ocean, potentially leaving a ruined landscape of leaky underground storage tanks, old pipes, and flooded road segments behind to pollute the water.”

A sign reads ‘Salt Water No Wake’ as ocean water floods a street in Key Largo in October 2019. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The threats faced by the Keys are shrugged off by some of its wealthy retirees who view the situation with a certain fatalism, while others in this Republican-voting bastion openly question the science. Eddie Martinez, one of the county’s five elected commissioners, challenged the Noaa scientist, William Sweet, on his sea level rise projections on Monday.

The sea level rise to date is “really a nothing number”, said Martinez, who told Sweet: “You’re a little bit more on this CO2 side, I’m more on the actual measurement side.” Another commissioner, David Rice, said that “predicting the future is probably best done with a crystal ball” and speculated that global temperatures could change following several volcanic eruptions.

“There are people who don’t want to sell because they love it here, others who want to get out while they can and those in complete denial who call you a troublemaker who is driving down property values by talking about it,” said George Smyth, a retiree who moved to Key Largo a decade ago for the quiet, slow-paced lifestyle. In 2019, his neighborhood spent 90 days partially submerged in water.

The nature of the Keys has changed in this time. While the islands still include pockets of poverty, an influx of affluent second-home owners has caused new properties to sprout up around Smyth. “It used to be pretty rough and tumble, you’d see a few fights on a Saturday night,” he said. “Now everyone looks like they’ve just come from the cosmetic dentist.”

A view of the ocean from a local park that frequently gets flooded when water levels rise, in Key Largo. Photograph: Saul Martinez/The Guardian

Other new realities are more laborious – Smyth has to wash his car continually to rid it of salt water and has to pay for trucks to unload piles of crushed-up rocks around his property as a buffer against the encroaching tides. While Smyth doesn’t class himself as particularly wealthy, these protections are beyond the means of low-income Keys residents, many of whom live in exposed mobile homes dotted along the islands.

Smyth fears that the county will require poorer residents to stump up the money for the roads, rather than put a levy on the tourists that flock to the Keys. “We feel we are being held hostage,” he said. “I feel sorrow for what is coming and the loss of what is a wonderful community.”

But the mayor defiantly insists the Keys can be saved, even if it is currently unclear how. “We know we live in paradise and we want to keep it that way,” said Coldiron.

Not Really Flooding

The spotlight that was recently centered on the Keys and the prolonged flooding, followed by an article examining the cost and return on investment of raising roads to stay above high tide flood levels have all combined to create some reaction in the Keys. And no, they tell us the sky is not falling.

Indeed the Key West Weekly devoted three pages of interviews with the national weather service who points to weather not climate as the culprit for flooding. Then there are the local politicians who assure us they are actively engaged in dealing with climate change issues. If you read through the assessments and plans and fears the idea is to create public buildings that stand high enough to stay dry in future prolonged high tides. What is clear is that flooding is not expected even by the pessimists to be a permanent Atlantis-like state. The idea seems to be that gradually more and more tides will sweep in, settle around human infrastructure and slowly retreat. And then come back in shorter intervals and for longer and no one knows when that will happen. From what I can glean it may be messy by 2045 maybe?  The other problem highlighted in The New York Times writing about the Key Largo neighborhood flooding is that the water is sea water and corrosive making driving through flooded areas a mess for vehicles thus submerged in salt water. Pumping stations for water and sewage are a concern also as they could be flooded for weeks unless raised up. Around here the submerged mangroves did fine though they are dropping a lot of yellow leaves as they disperse the salt from their systems. Grasses and ground cover that were submerged for weeks are now dead at the margins of the mangroves along the trails I walk.

The Weekly also carried an opinion piece filled with optimistic proclamations that the Keys will survive by adapting and building up beaches and encouraging plant growth while also raising the roads and buildings. No one has yet explained where the money for all this will come from and in the spirit of blind optimism expect no answers here. "....that which challenges us leads to new ideas and better days."  And much higher taxes I dare say, in a community averse to taxation to start with.

The former journalist in me prompted me to look up America's WETLAND  Foundation and the suspicion is that we are getting our own dose of Astroturfing to play down the climate implications of unprecedented flooding.

Wikipedia:

America's WETLAND Foundation (AWF) is a nonprofit, tax exempt 501(c)(3) organization with the stated mission to save and conserve coastal wetlands in the U.S. state of Louisiana. The organization aims to achieve this mission through a public awareness campaign on the impact Louisiana's wetland loss has on the state, region, nation and world.

AWF is based in New Orleans, Louisiana. The public education campaign started in 2002, when the AWF board hired the public relations Marmillion + Company.^[3]

Since being formed in 2003, America's Wetland officials say its message and outreach has resulted in more than 1 billion media impressions worldwide. That tally includes documentaries, news shows, feature stories, billboards, festivals, special events, public-service announcements and Web sites

Sourcewatch.org:

America's Wetland Foundation (AWF) has been called a front group created in 2002 by Shell, and funded by the American Petroleum Institute, BP and a host of other oil industry companies.^[1] The group has been described by the Huffington Post as the "oil industry using a perfectly-named front group to solicit taxpayer assistance for BP's cleanup bill" for coastal damage resulting from the Deepwater Horizon spill, although the organization disputes that characterization

Aside from the expense incurred by raising public infrastructure above expected flood levels the value of property won't be sustained if the tipping point arrives and there can be no avoiding the fact that these islands are indeed sinking. Property values are bound to plummet. For now the best tactic seems to be to continue hoping for best. Comparing the Keys to Venice is just weird in my opinion. Venice was built on pilings deliberately and in the face of massive overcrowding and flooding is taking measures to limit tourism and to limit cruise ships. two suggestions that indicate a totally different mentality and set of expectations. In the Keys we expect life to continue as normal, seren peaceful suburbia in the tropics. In Venice they've had thousands of years to get used to periodic floods and on a continent that is actively acknowledging climate change and taking steps to reduce emissions drastically a certain resignation is appropriate.  In the Keys we are forced to pretend none of this is really happening. this is all just a media scare. Okay then.

We all have a stake in ignoring climate change and the 97% of climate scientists worldwide who are sounding an increasingly frantic alarm. I have no idea what to do as I too would prefer a technological check mate to the problem, a mechanical solution that lets us all continue as we are. And with the leadership we have I guess we might as well hope that somehow we will deal with it. 

Come on down, prices are still astronomical. It's hard to see how climate change has impacted anything around here. Long may it last.

They See Us Flooding

NOT SAVING THE KEYS: NEW YORK TIMES

It's an article worth reading, click the link above, if only to read how my neighbors just don't get it.  Take this resident of flooding Sugarloaf:

“What’s government for? They’re supposed to protect your property,” Mr. Silverman said from behind the wheel of his shallow skiff boat on a recent afternoon.

Others quoted in the article are more sanguine about the future acknowledging their time may be short and there is even mention of "stopping climate change" which would involve not only vastly more expense than raising the roads (!) which is bad enough but cutting emissions to make  a difference will require good deal more in terms of lifestyle changes. Overall there is some pervasive belief that something needs to be done to make the effects of climate change go away. 

The article was prompted by a  report presented to the Monroe County Commission by the County Sustainability Director. She estimated that by 2025 high tides would cover the old State Highway 4A along the south shore of Sugarloaf Key and the two dozen homes (that many?!) will be cut off by those high tides. To raise just three miles of road  15 inches, enough to keep it dry year round in 2025 will cost $75 million. Double that to keep it dry in 2045. With 300 miles of road to worry about the County Mayor's response according to The Times was to hope county staff had got their numbers wrong.

All this climate change angst has been brought into focus by Hurricane Dorian, the storm that wrecked the Bahamas and Ocracoke Island in North Carolina. I say that because this is the second article I've seen this Fall by the New York Times discussing Florida Keys flooding. I suppose it makes a change from watching California burn and Illinois drown. The so called "king tides" this year were prolonged for three months and that caused some anxiety as you might imagine.

The first two pictures I took in 2014, the one above a few weeks ago when the tides were flooding the trail. What happened was the hurricane blowing up the east coast stalled the Gulf Stream and blew water back into the Keys right at the time of extra high tides. They are caused every year in the Fall by the alignment of sun and moon whose combined strength creates extra high tides, so called "king tides." 

What all this means is that we got a sneak preview of what rising sea levels will do. Whats really scary to me is the official response: let's hope its not as bad as some people expect it will be. The reason I find that worrying is because it pretty much reflects my thinking on the subject. No one in charge can bring themselves to admit the truth of what's happening because they rightly fear being crucified by people whose biggest worry is their property values. The United States has been built to take advantage of internal combustion and turning that ship around with our distances, urban sprawl, and massive roadway investments is going to take more than wishing we could have public transit the way Europeans do. We don't live crushed together like they do. If you want modern serviceable transit we need to pile on and all live as though we were in Manhattan not Miami.

But even then are we going to reverse climate change? It is a situation that is causing unpleasantness everywhere. Alaskan villages have to be physically moved as sea level rises and the tundra melts. Australia has the most appalling drought and wildfires; storms wreck Asian coastlines and the Marshall islands are already half way sunk. But here in the US at mangrove central we are the hot topic of conversation. The Keys, everyone's vacation memory is only a few inches tall and already they are slipping away to oblivion. Bummer.

No, I had to reassure a friend, house prices aren't plummeting, everything looks normal in the Lower Keys. So far. But I expect we will get more attention as time goes by and the greenhouse effect keeps pressing down on us. The end of cheap electricity and air conditioning for all will empty out the Keys faster than rising seas I suspect. For now we keep calm and carry on. You should do the same.  There is no alternative.