MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – The South Florida people have known historically will not be the South Florida of the next 100 years. There is dwindling doubt that South Florida is up against time and tides.
But for how long and how high? For the Florida Keys, is it the whole peninsula's coast?
"It's not just water coming over the shoreline," Miami Beach chief engineer Bruce Mowry said. "It's the water under the city also (that) we have to look at."
Miami Beach is spending up to half-a-billion dollars to brace for the scientific projections that add three feet of sea level rise by the turn of the century, 85 years from now.
The most visible signs of shoring up are dozens of new pumps throughout the city.
"We're taking water that flows via gravity and we're raising it up so that it can discharge into the bay as a receiving body, even though that bay may be higher than where the pipes are today," Eric Carpenter, director of Miami Beach Public Works, told Local 10 News.
Three miles of 3-foot high sea walls will be topped off to 5 feet high. Discussions are ongoing to change the codes for raised streets and buildings. It has been done before in the mid-1800s, when engineers figured out how to raise Chicago with hydraulic jacks to put in city-wide drainage.
Marilys Nepomechie, an architect and professor at Florida International University, said it "is not an inexpensive proposition."
"Obviously, when you do the math, $23 billion worth of private property value versus the $300 million to $500 million we're doing in stormwater improvements to buy us another 30 to 50 years, it makes all the sense in the world," Carpenter said.
Miami Beach expects residents will be eventually pay $200 to $300 more per year in stormwater fees for those protections against sea-level rise.
Nepomechie doesn't know if Miami Beach is the next Amsterdam or Venice, but did say that the city is "in the process of negotiating that relationship with the water."
Negotiations are examining the relationship with rising water and its rising costs.
To learn more about sea-level rise in South Florida, click here.
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