The city is spending millions of dollars to lift itself higher, but sea level rise predictions seem to get worse every day.
MIAMI BEACH — Harold Wanless sits on a bench in Maurice Gibb Memorial Park beside a new concrete sea wall, the sound of hammers and drills emanating from Bell Isle across a cloudy, turquoise inlet of Biscayne Bay. Knowing what he does about how fast the water surrounding these porous barrier islands is rising, Wanless, director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and a leading expert on sea level rise, marvels at the level of denial the latest building boom requires.
Having spent nearly six decades studying the geologic impacts of rising seas on global coastlines since the last Ice Age, Wanless can foresee the disaster that will overtake his city as surely as critics predicted the death of the cocaine-fueled disco era 40 years ago. The initial $500 million solution for Sunset Harbor and other low-lying sections now serves as a template for other parts of the city: Raise roads up to 2 feet, increase the height of the sea wall on city-owned shoreline, require new private construction to be one foot above base flood elevation and install permanent hydraulic pumping stations to protect existing buildings from flooding.
“These streets are all going to go under another transformation in the next 80 years — it may be a couple different transformations — so this will be a constant thing we’ll be addressing, like a lot of coastal communities,” Gelber says. Gelber contends that the installation of more pumps will take care of that problem and that homes and businesses at the original grade can connect to the hydraulic network for free. Making that case to the city’s skeptical residents, however, has become a big part of his job.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, among others, disagree. In a 2018 study the group found that flooding exacerbated by sea level rise will, by the year 2045, threaten 12,095 homes in Miami Beach valued at $6.4 billion. Doing nothing on North Bay Road is already problematic. “It floods just about every time it rains,” Kimberley Green, president of the Green Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving global health care services to the poor, says from the front steps of her single-story home.
When asked whether any of her neighbors support the plain to raise the road, she gestures across the street to a fenced-off bay front lot with a for sale sign planted out front and says it once belonged to Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, a real-life “Scarface” whose property went derelict after his 1993 death in Medellín in a shootout with Colombian police.‘Political will and money’In some ways, Miami Beach is lucky.
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