The Trickster & Climate Change

our mailbox, tropical storm Isaac, 2012

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Most of South Florida sits about six feet above sea level, on a porous limestone plateau. There are no hills. The area is as flat as an envelope and crisscrossed by more than 2,000 miles of regional canals and levees that are intended to prevent flooding in surrounding neighborhoods.

“Imagine Swiss cheese, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the rock under southern Florida looks like,” says Glenn Landers, a senior engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  This means that during high tides – or when the water management district releases more water into the canals – water seeps into yards, roads, beneath buildings. In Miami, this seepage at high tide has already become a big problem.

 From a recent piece in the New York Times:

The sunny-day flooding was happening again. During high tide one recent afternoon, Eliseo Toussaint looked out the window of his Alton Road laundromat and watched bottle-green saltwater seep from the gutters, fill the street and block the entrance to his front door.

“This never used to happen,” Mr. Toussaint said. “I’ve owned this place eight years, and now it’s all the time.”

Down the block at an electronics store it is even worse. Jankel Aleman, a salesman, keeps plastic bags and rubber bands handy to wrap around his feet when he trudges from his car to the store through ever-rising waters.

Alton Road runs right through the heart of trendy South Beach, the Art Deco district where a lot of the original Miami Vice TV show was filmed.

Regardless of whether you believe that climate change is man-made, part of a natural cycle, or some combination of both, it appears that South Florida may be ground zero for the rising oceans. The National Climate Assessment, a scientific report recently issued on global warming and climate change, pinpointed Miami as one of the most vulnerable cities.

“The theme of the report is that climate change is not a future thing, it’s a ‘happening-now’ thing,” said Leonard Berry, a contributing author of the new report and director of the Florida Center for Environmental Studies at Florida Atlantic University. “Alton Road is one of the now things.”

Our area of Wellington lies fifteen miles or so inland from the Atlantic and is between thirteen and fifteen feet above sea level.  So, okay, if the seas rise three or four feet, the town will still be high and dry right? Not necessarily. In August 2012, we got a taste of what can happen when the canals fail to do what they were designed to do.

When Hurricane Isaac impacted South Florida, is was just a tropical storm and never made landfall. But it dumped 15 to 20  inches of rain in Palm Beach County in about a 24 hour period and that proved to be too much too fast for drainage canals and pumps. Entire neighborhoods flooded.

I remember that when I drove to the gym that morning, the rain was minimal. We were told the storm had moved on. When I left the gym an hour later, the rain pounded my car, visibility had shrunk to maybe two inches, and I later learned that a band of thunderstorms had stalled just off the coast. When I turned into our neighborhood, water rose to halfway up the doors. I drove up on the sidewalk and through yards, but the water overwhelmed my car, a Mazda 3, and it stalled.

as the water began to recede

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I called Rob and told him what had happened. He advised me to try to start the car and if it wouldn’t start, I should just leave it where it was and hoof it back to the house. I kept turning the key in the ignition and eventually, the engine caught and I was able to make it into our driveway and on into the garage, where the overwhelmed engine promptly died.

The rain didn’t cease. It kept coming down. We watched the water pouring up through the drains, and out in the street and into our yards. At one point, our mailbox looked like an isolated island. The water crept up our driveway and the front yard and sidewalk. It drew closer and closer to the house and our garage. If the water flooded our garage, if it reached the front door, it wouldn’t have to rise more than a quarter of an inch to get into the house.

When you are witness to an excess of any element, you realize just how powerless you are when pitted against nature. I kept thinking of the flooding of New Orleans when the levees broke in the aftermath of Katrina. I imagined Rob and I and our animals on the roof of our house. I completely freaked myself out.

We were stranded in our house for two days- but not on the roof! By the time we were finally able to drive out in our SUV, the canals across the street and behind our neighborhood were still washing across the road. The water management district, which was supposed to prevent this kind of flooding, had failed monumentally. And part of the reason is due to our governor, Rick Scott. After he took office in 2010, he pushed for deep spending cuts in the water management district. As a result, more than $100 million was cut from the agency designed to prevent flooding from Orlando to the keys.

Here’s part of the trickster’s message. You want to live here?  Ok, fine. Your car engine is now ruined. But it’s  going to cost you $1,000 for a replacement engine with 4,000 miles on it. Your insurance will cover the rest. Oh gee, what a deal.

Now it’s hurricane season again. No hurricane has made landfall since Wilma in 2005, and I’m hoping we will be lucky again this year. But the bottom line is that we are in the midst of climate change. And yet, Republican senator Marco Rubio – whose area includes Miami Beach- challenges the science and balks at any government fixes. He’s in good company. Our current governor, Rick Scott, and former governor Jeb Bush, a potential Republican presidential candidate for 2016,  also deny that 7 billion plus souls on the planet leave any carbon footprint.

Maybe it’s time to head for the mountains.

Or to stay put and collectively visualize something far better.