This is what happens during high tide in Palm Beach. My family grew up rollerblading on these trails that now routinely flood.
People lie all the time. In my business you get used to it and with politicians you expect it. That’s especially true if that politician is Governor Rick Scott. Seriously, what do you expect from a guy whose company fleeced U.S. taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars and claimed he knew nothing of it? Do you believe that? Me, either. This is the Republican idea of leadership: picking a guy to be governor who should rightly be using what little of his fortune he has left to keep from being passed around like a bag of Oreos in his prison block.
When it comes to his denial of climate change, I can tell you exactly why Rick Scott is lying. On the news you’ll hear the helmet-hair anchors claim some coastal zones in Florida will be flooded in 85 years but that too is a lie. That “nuisance flooding” they’re talking about isn’t a comfortable 100 years in the future; it’s right here, right now. This is one case where the lying isn’t about avoiding a 20 year stretch in pound-them-in-the-ass federal prison, it’s about survival.
If the unfiltered truth came out what the world would learn is that low-lying areas in Florida are already flooding regularly. Not during the rainy season, though it floods then, too, but during high tide. Parts of Miami, parts of Palm Beach don’t just flood after rains, they flood nearly every day. During king tides, the days when tides are highest during the month, they can flood twice a day. Nearly every day you can go over to Palm Beach and find places where the storm drains flow backwards at certain times of the day, where some boat docks are underwater and even shallow waves will top the tide walls. That’s not 85 years in the future, that’s today; that’s right now.
An example of storm drains flowing backwards at high tide.
All around Miami crews are working at a feverish pace to raise storm drains and to protect the aquifer casing that connects Miami to its underground supply of freshwater from saltwater intrusion. Due to the composition of the soil under Florida, Miami is eventually going to lose that fight. It’s a virtual guarantee that, some day, Miami will lose its source of freshwater. There’s some vague talk of reverse osmosis and distilling sea water, but it’s hard to keep a city the size of Miami going with desalination.
When it rains, now that’s a whole different story there. When the federal National Climate Assessment says that the low-lying areas of Florida can flood during heavy rain events, they’re not making a far flung future prediction, they’re reporting the news. During the summer you can expect a “heavy rain event” pretty much every afternoon. Late spring and early summer, the rainy season here in Florida, is when it’s the worst. You can see it on the news at least once a week. There are videos of cars immersed up to the windows, buses stranded, people wading up to their knees on city sidewalks and kids body surfing down streets and sidewalks. Business owners in certain parts of town have taken to keeping boots and sandbags handy.
That daily reality here in South Florida is why Rick Scott and other Florida state officials lie with tenacity that borders on desperation and why, had Charlie Crist won the election last year, he’d likely be doing the same thing. The truth is South Florida is going to be dead long before the waters rise high enough to claim any significant amount of the land. What’s going to kill Florida is not being able to get a mortgage and not being able to get flood insurance, homeowners insurance or business investments.
I’m actually surprised that you can still get a mortgage for a coastal property and still get insurance in low-lying areas, but that’s not going to last. At some point insurance companies and mortgage providers are going to wake up to the fact that Florida is not going to be able to stop the water.
One reason you can still get property insurance at all is because Florida has been insanely lucky when it comes to hurricanes. Whenever I mention that fact down here, my friends will hit me and say, “Shush!” See, they’re doing a little Rick Scott number in everyday life. The deep seated fear no one wants to admit is, if South Florida gets hit by a big enough hurricane coming in from the right direction, you’re going to find boats washed up on I-95. When the big one hits it’s going to make hurricane Katrina look like a Texas dust devil. The damage won’t be in the tens of billions, it will be in the hundreds of billions.
When the "big one" hits South Florida, this is all going to be underwater.
That epic event will be the wake up call that mortgage providers and insurance companies will need to realize that South Florida, for all its trendy charm and Latin rhythm, is a bad risk. Investment will dry up, sports teams will leave, jobs will flee the state. That’s what’s going to kill Florida and that’s why state officials will continue to deny there’s a problem with climate change until the waves finally cover the city.
The good news, if there is any, is that your grandkids are going to be able to go scuba diving in the world’s most awesome underwater park.