Climate Change is Climbing Mount Dora (2)
A State in Jeopardy
Part two of a six-part report
The first real evidence that the foretold was now the moment arrived in reports that Miami was experiencing severe flooding during its seasonal King tides and “sunny day flooding” on when the sea just felt like encroaching on days when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It began to make the predictions of three feet of sea level rise by the end of this century sound local — a threat fast becoming a reality.
After that we heard about the massive infrastructure project in Miami, half a billion dollars spent raising streets and improving drainage to protect some two trillion dollars in real estate. The city hired a resilience manager (studiously avoiding reference to climate change, a term banished from conversation in the light of day by Florida’s Republican governor Rick Scott).
South Florida’s average elevation is just six feet above sea level, which in worst-case sea-level rise scenarios has it almost wholly underwater by the next century.
Making is worse for South Florida is that with sea-level rise, groundwater also rises, making the area less able to absorb storm water. The existing storm drain infrastructure was built for conditions which no longer exist, and so when it rains hard, water comes up though the storm drains flooding streets. When Tropical Storm Elena blew down through South Florida earlier this month — a weak rain-maker by all accounts — six inches was all — streets, garages, even elevators flooded.
What’s odd is that South Florida was desperately dry all spring, with the biggest wildfires in the state in Collier County. (Drought and wet cycles are anticipated to increase as the planet warms up.) Then the rainy season came, and it’s done nothing but rain on South Florida.
Freshwater runoff from nitrate-soaked Lake Okeechobee threatens to sprout another toxic algae bloom similar to the one that killed off millions of fish in the Indian River Lagoon last year.
But the perils of sea-level rise are not restricted to Miami. Fort Lauderdale and cities up the coast in Brevard County are all experiencing sea level rise and related headaches.
If you own coastal real estate along Florida’s 1,350 miles of coastline, you have got to be getting nervous. An April 2017 Bloomberg article by Christopher Flavelle raised serious questions about demand and financing for coastal properties long before sea levels encroach to a threatening level. The real estate site Zillow estimates that some 934,000 exiting Florida properties worth more than $400 billion are at risk.
The Washington Post recently reported about how vulnerable Tampa Bay is to the ravages of a Katrina-sized hurricane (and remember, storms are predicted to increase in intensity as we go forward). If a category 3 hurricane were to hit downtown St. Petersburg, everything would be 15 feet under water. Tampa Bay is especially exposed because the bay acts as a water funnel. There are 700 miles of coastline along Tampa Bay, and a Boston firm analyzing potential risk from such a storm reported that a hurricane the size of Katrina would cause $175 billion in damage, affecting some 450,000 homes. A World Bank study named Tampa Bay as one of the 10 most at-risk coastal areas in the world and the most vulnerable in the United States.
Hurricane Hermine in September 2016 was mostly a rain event, but the extra water so stressed St. Petersburg’s inadequate storm pipes and treatment tanks that some 150 million gallons of partly treated raw sewage mixed with rainwater was dumped into Tampa Bay.
Jacksonville is experiencing impacts as well, with nuisance flooding in St. Augustine and Mayport and heavy storm surges from Hurricane Matthew. By 2030 as much as 25 percent of St. Augustine’s land could be flooded by just 1 foot of sea level rise. Jacksonville’s downtown real estate is vulnerable, though much of the rest of the city sits high and dry by Florida standards — roughly 16 feet above sea level. And with properties still relatively cheap, much of the grand migration from flooded coastal areas down south may eventually come Jacksonville’s way.
A very odd thing about Florida is that, although the state’s coastline is predicted to be Ground Zero for climate change impacts in the United States, population projections show the state continuing to grow at a fast clip. People are moving into the state in seeming abandon. Florida is expected to gain almost 14 million residents by 2050; Central Florida will gain 3 million and Broward County alone will gain 1.25 million. Mount Dora is seeing its own population explosion now with building out around the Wekiva Expressway exit; projections are that the city’s population will almost double, to 25,000. The corridor between Mount Dora and Sanford is expected to build out.
Toward the end of the century, migration from flooded coastal areas is expected to begin to slow the state’s growth, but until then rampant new housing developments will continue engorge the state’s need for more roads, schools, policing and water. If you’re like me, it’s as if Florida is blithely building itself up for catastrophe, ignoring all the warnings now sounded by the scientific community.
Climate change is here in Florida. The question is: What are we going to do about it — and when?
Next: Inland—but not out of danger
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
David Cohea edits the blog and Facebook page Mount Dora Topics and is director of Live Oak Collective, a Mount Dora, FL-based historic and environmental preservation community.
