“May you live in interesting times” is my favorite fortune cookie.
We do in South Florida, where we are witnessing our dawdling destruction, dripping down on us like a game of Chinese water torture.
Sea-level rise is the vexatious reality of our times, and we have a front row seat as spectators but are powerless to prevent it.
The Sun-Sentinel’s terrifically reported Rising Seas: Inching Towards Disaster, spelled that unfortunate truth out for us again this week. Sometime in the future, whether its decades or sooner, we’ll be submerged into the sea. And all we can do is watch.
Take a drive through Hollywood, Hallandale, Fort Lauderdale, Miami Beach or just about any town or city in our region, and the evidence is everywhere. Large chunks of pavement and pipe are being frantically replaced as streets flood with more frequency. Million-dollar beachfront properties are eroding into sandcastles. Roads become tributaries during heavy downpours. Street flooding often occurs even when there is no rain, especially during equinox tides in the spring and fall.
That is just a preview of the slow motion destruction. Although no one can accurately predict how much and when, as the paper’s series reported, a one foot rise in sea-level (entirely possible in many of our lifetimes) would permanently submerge an area totaling six square miles in southeast Broward containing some of the region’s most valuable real estate.
According to Dr. Hal Wanless, who chairs the University of Miami’s Geological Sciences Department, a five foot rise (possible by the end of this century) would render the county a “wetland.” Wanless warns that rapid ice melt occurring Greenland could accelerate a process that has already started. The World Resources Institute reports that average annual sea-level rise was 78 percent higher between 1993 and 2011 than it was in the period between 1961 and 1993.
Since Palm Beach County lies on significantly higher ground than Broward or Miami-Dade, the rising seas should eventually force a mass migration of our population to the north.
Not even our water supply is safe. Ninety percent of South Florida gets its fresh water from aquifers below ground. However, salt water will continue seeping up from underneath us, through the porous limestone that supports our flat peninsula, spoiling that supply.
A powerful hurricane or long rain event would expedite the process. Sandy did that in 2012, just by brushing by us. Despite passing 200 miles offshore, its edges took out parts of A1A in Fort Lauderdale,and decimated already eroded coastlines everywhere. If Sandy had taken a path slightly more towards the west, it might have doomed us completely.
A Rolling Stone article from 2013 paints a hypothetically grim picture, depicting a category 5 system that renders the region uninhabitable, leaving watery and sandy remnants and a radioactive cloud.
But the reality – even without a storm – is scary is enough.
Cities and counties are spending millions, even billions in mitigation efforts. Our underground pipes and infrastructure are being re-retrofitted for the inevitable onslaught of waters. In many low lying communities, old water supplies and tanks are being abandoned, sending municipalities in mad scrambles to rebuild them or find new water supplies. Have you seen your utility bill lately?
There are some forward thinkers. The four-county Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact collaborative has been a positive since its formation in 2010.
A catalyst for that effort, Broward commissioner and two-time mayor Kristin Jacobs has been vocal and proactive, appointed last fall to President Obama’s Task Force on Climate Change and Preparedness.
Longtime Miami-Dade Clerk of Courts Harvey Ruvin was considered heretical when he first broached the topic and spoke out on sea-level rise in South Florida more than 30 years ago.
We should have listened and been ready. We should have stopped constructing houses, condos and buildings that encroach the sea and improved our infrastructure in advance.
Now all we can do is try to catch up. A new generation of leaders on the local, state and national level are needed to bring attention to the slowest moving, yet most important story of a generation.
Too bad we missed the boat. Because we could really use one now.
Write to Phil Latzman at or follow him on Twitter @PhilLatzman
