A twenty foot wall? Miami faces tough decision on climate change

MIAMI.- Three years ago, shortly after Hurricane Irma left parts of Miami underwater, the federal government launched a study to find a way to protect the South Florida coast vulnerable to deadly and destructive storm surge. Nobody likes the answer anymore.

Build a wall, proposed by the US Army Corps of Engineers in its first draft of the study, currently under review. De hecho, diez kilómetros, en su mayoría tierra adentro, corren paralelos a la costa a través de los vecindarios, excepto por un tramo de un kilómetro y medio justo en la bahía Biscayne, más allá de los relucientes edificios de Brickell, el distrito financiero from the city.

The dramatic $ 6 billion proposal remains tentative and is at least five years late. But The surprising suggestion of a huge 20-foot-high boardwalk that would cross beautiful Biscayne Bay was enough to grab the attention of some Miami residents.. The tough decisions that will be required to cope with the many the city’s environmental challenges are there, and few people want to face it.

“We need to have a conversation about, culturally, what our priorities areSaid Benjamin Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami. “Where do we want to invest? Where does that make sense?

“These are what I call generational questions.”added. “And there is a huge reluctance to enter this discussion”.

In Miami, the metropolitan area of ​​the country that is perhaps the most exposed to sea level rise, the problem is not denial of climate change. Not when the hurricane season, which begins this week, returns each year with more intense and frequent storms. Not when finding flood insurance has become increasingly difficult and unaffordable. Not when the nights are so hot that leaving the house in a sweater to protect yourself from the cold at night is a thing of the past.

The problem is that the scale of the interconnected obstacles facing the region can seem overwhelming and none of the possible solutions are cheap, easy or pretty.

For its study, the Army Corps of Engineers focused on storm surge, the rise in sea level which often floods the coast during storms, worsened lately by stronger hurricanes and higher sea level. But that’s only a concern.

Low and flat South Florida sits on porous limestone, allowing the ocean to swell through the ground. Even when there is no thunderstorm sea ​​level rise contributes to greater tidal flooding, where the streets fill with water even on sunny days. Saltwater expansion threatens to spoil the underground aquifer that supplies the region’s drinking water and breaking old sewer pipes and old septic tanks. It leaves less space for the land to absorb liquids, so floodwaters linger longer, its runoff pollutes the bay and kills fish.

And that’s just the rise in sea level. Temperatures have become so sweltering in recent summers that Miami-Dade County has appointed a new interim “heat director”..

Fractional treatment

“What he realizes is that each of these issues, which are totally intertwined, are being addressed by different parts of government,” said Amy Clement, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami and chair of the City of Miami Climate Resilience Committee. “It’s broken down into a number of ways that make it really, really hard to move forward. And the bottom line is, it’s a lot more money than any local government has to spend, ”he added.

The state could help, up to a point. Republican lawmakers, who have controlled the Florida legislature for more than 20 years, admitted in late 2019 that they had ignored climate change for so long that the state had “lost a decade.” They began to take steps to fund solutions, allocating more than $ 200 million in taxes, collected in real estate transactions, to sea level rise and sanitation projects. Lawmakers also designated $ 500 million in federal stimulus for the fund.

However, the cost of everything that needs to be done is in the billions. The estimate for Miami-Dade County to phase out around 120,000 septic tanks is around $ 4 billion, and that doesn’t include the thousands of dollars that every homeowner would have to pay as well.

No one wants to turn down a dime from Washington, but the proposal for a massive wall along one of Miami’s most scenic stretches has produced a rare moment of agreement between environmentalists and real estate developers, who fear damaging the delicate ecology of the bay and lowering property values.

“The $ 40 billion in assets they are trying to protect will shrink if they build a wall around the center, as it will affect market values ​​and quality of life.Said Ken Russell, the commissioner for the city of Miami whose district includes Brickell.

Other parts of the preliminary plan, which include storm barriers at the mouth of the Miami River and several other waterways, are more attractive: fortify wastewater treatment plants and fire and police stations to withstand an avalanche of seawater. Raise or protect thousands of businesses and homes from flooding. Plant mangroves, which can be a first line of defense against flooding and erosion. Miami-Dade County wants all these parts to come first; a final draft of the plan is expected this fall.

Points of conflict remain. Among the houses proposed to be raised with taxpayer wages are the multi-million dollar waterfront mansions, a result of the Army Corps of Engineers tenure of effectively protecting as many lives and assets as possible, which critics say inevitably leads to better protection of the rich, whose assets are worth more.

And then there are the walls. Interior walls, some quite small, but others up to four meters high, would divide the neighborhoods, leaving the houses on the sea side with less protection.. The wall along Biscayne Bay, which could rise up to six meters and sound as formidable as the sound walls along Interstate 95, would reverse decades of policies aimed at preventing dredging and infilling of the bay.

When local governments asked the public how they would like to tackle climate change, residents much prefer what is called green infrastructure: layered coastal protection of a mixture of dunes, sea grasses, coral reefs and mangrovessaid Zelalem Adefris, vice president of policy and advocacy at Catalyst Miami, which works with low-income communities in the county.

“The Army Corps of Engineers plan looks so different… It seems really incongruous with the conversations going on at the local level,” Adefris said.

Army Corps of Engineers officials, however, say, gently, that they see no way around what they call structural elements. The storm surge threat to Miami-Dade County is too serious.

The New York Times

The New York Times

Conocé The Trust Project