Miami vise: Rising seas put the squeeze on a sun-drenched beach town

[xchrom]

http://grist.org/cities/miami-vise-rising-seas-put-the-squeeze-on-a-sun-drenched-beach-town/

?w=470&h=265&crop=1

It’s a balmy, mid-November morning in Miami Beach, Fla., and I’m sitting at one of the cafe tables in front of the local Whole Foods, sipping a cup of coffee, and watching the tide come up. Oh, you can’t see the ocean from here. The tide is gurgling up through the storm drains along the street.

It starts at about 8:00. A trickle of water from a nearby grate quickly becomes a stream which becomes a lake, spreading across the intersection of Alton Road and 10th Street. By 8:20, water pours off of the cars rolling into the parking lot. At 8:40, it reaches the axles of the Jeep parked on the corner. Pedestrians abandon the submerged sidewalks for high ground in the middle of the Alton Road, dodging rooster tails kicked up by passing vehicles. To get back across town, I’ll have to wade through murk that comes almost to my knees.

One of my sources here, a scientist studying the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise, tells me that if I stick my finger in that water and taste it, it will be salty. I look at the gunk burbling out of the gutters, swirling with oily rainbows and cigarette butts, and decide to take her word for it.

The water is coming from Biscayne Bay, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that lies between Miami Beach and the city of Miami. Steadily rising high tides in recent years have driven the stuff backwards through the storm drains, underneath protective seawalls, spilling into the streets and spawning a multimillion dollar retrofit to the city’s drainage system. In the process, Crockett and Tubbs’ seaside haunt has become a bellwether for coastal communities everywhere that are only just beginning to grok the implications of a problem that will dog us for generations.

[global1]

1. Well - That's Just An 'Inconvenient Truth' (sarcasm).......nt

[northoftheborder]

2. yep

[hunter]

3. Time's coming when we have to relocate and recycle coastal cities or abandon them to the ocean.

We can do this the difficult way, climate change refugees in camps or major expensive (and sadly temporary) engineering works, or we can offer people safer communities elsewhere, same rules applying to places where the water has run out or places where people who can't afford air cooling die.