On a bayside street in Miami Shores, water bubbled from the asphalt. It flowed up a drain and covered the entire street within a few hours, despite a completely clear sky.
Saturday marked the peak of this season’s king tide, the highest tide of the year. Across South Florida and along the East Coast, salt water crept into streets and yards, offering a glimpse of a near future with higher sea levels.
Rigobert Merisier’s usual parking spot — above a street drain — was covered in several inches of water Saturday morning when he returned to the grocery store. He maneuvered his car into the middle of the street, where his daughter could grab groceries from the front seat without getting her feet wet.
In the seven years Merisier has lived here, water has been a problem. Floods destroyed his car, a Mazda, three years ago. Fresh sod, just three days old, is on his front lawn, replacing the grass that died under a deluge of saltwater earlier this summer.
And last year, water found its way into his Miami Shores home through his toilet and shower after his septic tank backed up due to the rising tide.
“We have asked the city for help. They brought pumps to the end of the street, but…’ he shrugged. At the end of the block, two temporary stormwater pumps hum, trying to move saltwater from the street back to Biscayne Bay.
Merisier says he’s fed up with flooding and the rising cost of living in his neighborhood. A condemned house at the end of the block, closer to the water, is for sale for more than $2 million.
“We want to leave Miami completely,” he said.
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His neighbor, Nicole Dorsonne, has lived on this street for thirty years. She also wants to leave, but her husband wants to stay. She said the flooding has gotten worse since she first moved to Miami Shores, and she’s tired of parking at the end of the street and wading back home.
“You need boots to live here, or a boat,” she joked.
How high is the water?
Six miles south, at Florida International University’s Kampong Botanical Garden outpost in Coconut Grove, the room was packed with scientists and volunteers charged with documenting this king tide.
Brenna Kays, a postdoctoral student at FIU studying climate change adaptation, led the audience through a brief lesson in how to use all the equipment they were given. First there was a tape measure to check the depth of the flood water. The measuring tape was rusted, a nod to the nine years this program, called FIU’s Sea Level Solutions Day, has been in existence.
Volunteers were also given bottles to scoop up some of the water, and refractometers, devices that helped measure the salinity of the flood water. In their package, they received a vial with a screw cap, with which they could collect a small sample of water and test it for E. Coli, a sign that the water might be contaminated by sewage.
That piqued the interest of Lucero Omana and Mariam Medina, a pair of environmental engineering students at FIU who are particularly concerned about how sea level rise is expected to break thousands of septic systems in Miami, spilling human waste onto the streets and into Biscayne Bay is spread out.
Medina, 26, said she wanted to get involved with the annual event to be part of the solution. By documenting the extent and danger of rising waters, planners can better understand what solutions are needed.
“If you don’t know what’s happening, you can’t stop it,” she said.
That’s exactly what event organizers like Kays want to hear. They believe in the power of citizen science, not only for increasing the number of sites the team can survey in one day during one high tide, but also for engaging people in the conversation about how sea level rise will change their community .
Tides were expected to be about two feet above high tide this year. South Florida could see that rate of sea level rise permanently by 2060, projections show.
“People are now talking about living with water. What does that look like? How do we adapt our cities and our people to be comfortable?” Kays said.
“If this is just the beginning, what will it look like in the future?”
‘An inconvenience’
Gene Drody has lived in Miami Shores since 1947. The 80-year-old retiree said he couldn’t imagine a better place to live, apart from the flooding.
It’s not that bad, he said. Just “an inconvenience” for his house, which rises slightly despite being next to a canal. On days with high water or during heavy rain showers, the street floods. It only ended up in his garage once, and it was only a few inches.
On Saturday, three temporary rainwater pumps were spread across the street at the canal, pumping water flowing from various street drains back into the canal.
“If the duct is higher than the pipe, you have to do the math,” he said.
Drody said Miami Shores has surveyed its neighborhood several times ahead of a major drainage project, an overhaul that could solve some of the problems plaguing the low-lying street. But so far no shovels have been dug to find a solution.
In the meantime, he said, some neighbors on the street are seeing water flowing through their yards and closer to their front doors. And their septic systems are working up because the previously dry dirt they’ve been discharging into becomes more and more soggy and soggy.
“I’m a naysayer about all this climate change stuff, but the tide is rising,” he said. “It has been a problem for thirty years, but it is getting worse due to sea level rise.”
