Water as We Look to the Future

Just as the ancient Floridians coped with the uncertainty of rising seas, today our state considers how to navigate — and build for — a flooded terrain.

Designing a future to
meet the rising seas

In coastal Florida, treasured old buildings are raised up and new ones reimagined, but will that be enough to hold back the waters?

By Ron Cunningham

Crawfish” Eddie Walker built his stilt shack over salt water in 1933, when Prohibition was still dampening spirits and Al Capone was Miami’s most notorious snowbird.

Walker’s shack gave birth to “Stiltsville,” and eventually this storied collection of offshore party houses would attract gamblers, boaters, fishermen and celebrities looking for a good time.

The remains of Stiltsville, clustered together in Biscayne Bay, are relics of a colorful Miami past. Oddly, they may also be forerunners of a drastically altered Miami future.
“They are not all that different from traditional structures you see in riverine environments like Bali and Indonesia,” says Victor Dover, of the Miami-based town planning firm Dover Kohl. “And we may see their likes again.”

Indeed, we already are…and in much grander fashion.

Perched on the very edge of Biscayne Bay is Miami’s dazzling $131 million Perez Art Museum. In Stiltsville tradition it sits on an elevated platform 10 feet above flood surge levels, and is painstakingly designed to remain dry when King Tide comes calling.

“It’s an interesting piece of architecture and a good example of how we have got to reshape the built environment so as to thrive in this new situation,” says Rudolphe el-Khoury, dean of the University of Miami’s school of architecture.

Slowly but surely, water is changing the way millions of people live, work and travel in coastal Florida. And nowhere is adaptation more evident than in Miami.

In what is regarded as one of the world’s most flood-endangered metropolises, new homes and buildings are being raised up, some designed with fast-draining parking structures (an octopus was discovered in one washed-out garage), retractable stairways, rain gardens artfully designed to capture water and divert it to the sea and other innovative flood and wind resistant features.

A 35-story office tower on Brickell Avenue — the heart of Miami’s business district — is designed with “large-missile impact-resistant” glass windows capable of withstanding 300-mph winds. And on Coral Gables’ “Miracle Mile,” the Giralda Avenue shopping plaza stood up against Hurricane Irma with no flood damage thanks to porous surfaces, water-absorbing landscaping and other climate-adaptive design features.

“One thing I like to emphasize is that (rising sea levels) present a business opportunity,” says Dean el-Khoury. “Development is our number one industry, and adapting to our changing conditions is not all gloom and doom. We are also prompted to think of the business potential in finding those solutions and energizing the development in south Florida.”

And it’s not just new buildings that are being reimagined and secured against the rising sea.
For instance, a historic, 1933 Star Island mansion – all two million pounds of it — was physically dug up out of the ground, placed on wheels, rotated 180-degrees and moved to higher elevation.

That sort of operation is “not cheap or easy, but because you love these buildings you are going to raise them up,” says Dover. “Who pays for that? Rich people. It is not a strategy for affordable housing.”

To protect Miami’s venerable Vizcaya Museum & Gardens — the Italian Renaissance mansion built at the dawn of the last century — Jannek Cederberg’s marine engineering company put up a concrete retaining wall to break up wave damage and restored damaged wetlands to add a natural layer of protection.

Cederberg’s company is working on adaptive measures to make Jose Marti Park, on the Miami River, and the bayside Matheson Hammock Park more resilient against flooding.

The key, he said, “is raising areas that are prone to flooding but doing it in a planned and gradual way that works for the community. You don’t want a wall that will remove the community’s connection to the water. You want solutions that you can build on, if necessary making small adjustments over a 10-, 20-, 30-year time frame.”

Further south, in the Florida Keys, a handful of “green” solar-powered, wind-resistant, modular homes stand on pillars 12-feet above ground.

“In the Keys they understand that we need to mitigate and we are doing that,” says Karen Adams, CEO of Green Dwellings, maker of the modular homes. “We are building state-of-the-art steel and concrete modulars that are hurricane resistant, sustainable and energy efficient.”
Arkup, a young Miami company, is borrowing from Dutch houseboat traditions and technology and marketing floating, self-contained, “off the grid” house-yachts — a starting price of just $5.5 million.

Slowly but surely, water is changing the way millions of people live, work and travel in coastal Florida. And nowhere is adaptation more evident than in Miami.

“Urban growth, rising seas and energy independence are key challenges for our generation,” says a company press statement. Arkup’s solution is “a unique, avant-garde concept of autonomous life on the water.”

Meanwhile, up and down coastal Florida, flood prone streets are being elevated, pumping stations and back-flow preventers installed, sea walls raised, sewers fortified, septic tanks phased out and other infrastructure improvements undertaken in what will in some cases become multi-billion dollar initiatives to try to stay above rising waters.

Tampa alone has already spent $251 million for drainage improvements. A study by the Center For Environmental Integrity indicates that Jacksonville may be the most expensive city in America to protect against rising waters. The city will need an estimated $3.5 billion for 632 miles of seawalls by 2040 if it intends to save thousands of homes.

Miami voters have approved a $400 million “Miami Forever” bond to help make that city more resilient. And on Miami Beach, a $439 million general obligation bond was passed by close to 70 percent of voters to help finance road elevations, install new pumping stations and more. The city’s eventual goal is to raise all of its streets 3.7 feet in order to stay above King Tide flooding.

None of this is especially unprecedented in the grand scheme of history.

“The typical street in Rome is now approximately 12-feet above those in Ancient Rome,” notes Dover. “They have continually raised the level of the city in response to flooding from the Tiber River. Areas that were once above ground are now catacombs.”

One crucial difference is that Rome endures still after nearly 3,000 years. But even optimistic projections indicate that even with extensive adaptive measures, Miami Beach, home to more than 90,000 people, may only be able to keep ahead of rising water until after the middle of this century.
After that, experts say, either new sustaining technologies must be developed or a gradual retreat inland, away from the encroaching ocean, will be well underway.

Or both.

“Basically we’re talking about stopgap operations that will let us live where we live as long as we can while we’re still planning how we’re going to relocate everybody,” says Roderick Scott, of L&R Resources, a Louisiana-based flood mitigation company. Scott has advised Miami Beach officials that thousands of buildings resting atop that city’s long, low sandbar base will have to be physically elevated to save them from flooding.

Projections published by the Southeast Florida Climate Compact indicate that sea levels are expected to rise 10-14 inches by 2040, and 20-54 inches by 2070. Sea levels around Florida have risen 8 inches since 1950.

And it’s not just the rising ocean that has local officials worried.

“Sea-level rise is coming at us from the east, the groundwater table is coming up from below. We’re getting more extreme rainfall events from the sky, and because the communities to our west are, in some cases, even lower than we are, they have the ability to push water at us,” says Nancy Gassman, sustainability officer for Fort Lauderdale.

Consider that nearby Davie, known as “Cowboy Town” for its rodeos and located 10 miles inland, has a stormwater improvement deficit that may exceed $300 million.

For its part, Fort Lauderdale — aka Florida’s Venice — has already installed 177 “tidal valves,” designed to divert storm water into the sea while keeping ocean water out. That city plans to install 200 more valves over the next five years. It is also building eight new pump stations in flood-prone neighborhoods, at a cost of $200 million.

“Our community is evolving to adjust to sea level concerns,” Gassman says. In canal-side neighborhoods “we’re seeing older residents selling out and making opportunities for the next owners to create more resilient homes. They are demolishing the older homes and are starting over using FEMA-approved wet and dry building techniques.”

And as if deciding how Floridians are going to live in a future confronted with rising water isn’t challenging enough, protecting what’s left of the way we used to live poses its own conundrums.

St. Augustine is America’s oldest city, and its historic district is ground zero in that community’s most flood vulnerable zone.

Castillo de San Marcos, on the edge of the Matanzas River, is constructed of porous coquina shell. Once valued for its ability to absorb cannon balls, the old fortress was not designed to withstand the eroding force of strong wind and frequent flooding.

To supplement the existing sea wall protecting the fort, the National Park Service has seeded the river’s edge with rocks that, over time, will fill in with sediment and support vegetation. It is hoped that this “living seawall” will help absorb the shock of future storms before they reach the fort.

But a state report concerning the bulk of St. Augustine’s historic district presents a pessimistic view of its future.

St. Augustine, which attracts six million visitors a year, “cannot protect all of its historic district or local buildings from flooding, nor can it accommodate flooding by elevating all historic buildings…nor can it simply move them and their surroundings in their entirety to another location,” states the report jointly funded by the Florida DEP and the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Yet, the city can do some of each of these.”

“The projections are dire,” said Morris Hylton, director of the University of Florida’s Historic Preservation Program, who has been working with St. Augustine. “There is no magic bullet, we’re on a crash course with sea level rise. Honestly, I think all we can do from my perspective is to work to keep people in the places they love for as long as we can, and I don’t know what that’s going to look like.”

Miami Beach’s historic Art Deco district is equally at risk. The cost of elevating just a single-family home can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Lifting a single bulky hotel constructed in the 1930s would cost millions.

Scott, who supervised the raising and relocation of the 3-million pound Czech and Slovak Museum, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, says some 15,000 buildings in Miami Beach alone are at risk of flooding. “There isn’t a structure in the world — unless it’s already gone — that can’t be elevated.”

But paying for such reclamations poses a major hurdle. And at some point, Scott argues, there needs to be a national financing plan to help protect an estimated three to four million buildings — some $1.5 trillion worth of assets — that are at flood risk in the U.S.

And what would Miami Beach be without its historic treasures?

“I don’t need to be doom and gloom but this is the moon shot of our generation,” Scott says. “We need to find a financing solution but we are running out of time. These buildings will be gone in a generation.”