Read the original article here in the Chatanooga Times Free Press.
Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
Opinion: For Miami, long feared future of climate change is the reality today
June 14, 2024 at 6:00 p.m.
<It’s like an unspoken social contract. When people choose to live in South Florida, they must make peace with the possibility that, thanks to hurricanes, there will be flooding and they may incur thousands of dollars to fix their homes post storm.
Last April — even before the 2023 hurricane season started — historic flooding in Fort Lauderdale caught residents and officials by surprise. The city had to use airboats to rescue people from their homes and, on the following day, abandoned cars caught in the water lined the streets of the city’s downtown.
When we hear about the threat of flooding and sea-level rise caused by climate change, that may appear like a distant future. It’s not — and this week’s torrential rainfall proves South Florida is not fully ready for increased water levels despite local governments and the state having spent millions of dollars to keep streets dry. Anyone driving in downtown Miami on a rainy day can see how quickly streets flood.
The pace of sea-level rise has picked up in recent years. The financial consequences are enormous for local governments as well as residents as the cost to insure homes and vehicles rise.
Local sea level has risen about a foot in the last 80 years, with 8 inches of that total in the last 30 years, the Herald reported in May. The second foot will take only 30 years; the next foot, 20 years, according to estimates by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The average elevation in Miami is only 3 feet.
Besides the impacts of climate change, warmer ocean waters and the melting of ice sheets, the Florida Current — an offshoot of the Gulf Stream, a massive current that runs from the tropics to the Arctic — can also impact water levels in Miami, the Herald reported.
Beyond tackling climate change on a global scale, our local and state officials will have to pick up the pace in preparing South Florida for the worst. In the city of Miami, for example, voters approved a 2018 bond referendum to finance sea-level rise mitigation but a constant complaint is that projects aren’t coming online quickly enough.
Florida has taken unprecedented steps to allocate dollars to help communities fund such projects. Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed a resilience officer to prepare Florida for the environmental and economic impacts of rising sea waters. Yet, this year, DeSantis signed a bill that lowered the standards for sea-rise projects eligible for state funding. He also signed another bill that removes references to “climate change” from Florida law.
This week showed that residents and businesses have to be mentally and physically prepared for flooding that we once thought we could anticipate as we tracked hurricane spaghetti models.
A Miami underwater is becoming a reality we’ll have to accept.