♪♪
-In order to understand whether hurricanes are getting worse,
we have to understand what they've done in the past.
-Joanne Muller is a paleotempestologist.
She's a scientist who studies the forensic record
of ancient storms. [ Thunder rumbles ]
-We're looking for evidence of past hurricane events
to try to understand what the hurricane history
is on the west coast of Florida.
♪♪
-Every major hurricane to ever hit Florida's coast
has left behind a calling card like the sediment
buried deep beneath this lagoon.
By sifting through the evidence of long-ago hurricanes,
Muller will help Miami predict storms of the future.
[ Thunder rumbles ]
The world's great cities face threats they have never
before encountered --
New York,
Tokyo,
London,
Miami.
The threats come from the sea,
from above
and from below.
These are the problems and their solutions...
♪♪
...for when the water comes.
[ Waves crashing ]
♪♪
-At their Florida Gulf Coast University lab,
Joanne Muller's team analyzes sediment cores
to create a timeline of hurricanes
that happened centuries ago.
-This is essentially the overwash
that the hurricane has produced, so this is what the hurricane
has brought back into the lagoon.
-Muller is looking at samples from 1,000 years ago.
From 950 to 1250 A.D., the Medieval Warm Period
was a time when the Atlantic Ocean was warmer than usual.
She finds that there's more sediment overwash
and evidence of more hurricane activity in that period.
-Well, what we're seeing here in southwest Florida
is time periods of activity and inactivity,
and these time periods of activity
are correlated with warmer sea-surface temperatures
in the main development region of the Atlantic,
so, for example, during the Medieval Warm Period
when sea-surface temperatures were warmer,
we see quite a few more overwashed layers
during that time period whereas, during the Little Ice Age,
which was a relatively cooler period,
sea-surface temperatures were relatively lower out
in the main development region.
We don't see any overwashed layers.
-With Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures now rising,
Muller's research indicates that Florida should expect
more hurricanes in the 21st century.
-So what this is telling us is that,
when sea-surface temperatures are warmer,
we tend to see more landfalling storms
here in southwest Florida,
and we should be expecting more storms like this.
[ Thunder rumbles ]
-From Miamians, the upside of living by the water
has always outweighed the drawbacks,
but while most residents are used to the flooding
and heavy rains that comes with tropical storms,
they're now facing a new kind of flooding,
which comes from below the ground,
often when there's not a cloud in the sky.
It happens during what's called king tides.
Locals just call it sunny-day flooding.
-The first time that, that happened,
I was surprised because what you find, it's --
At the end of this road in particular,
you'll find a bunch of water and big puddles.
-Laura Pantano is a real-estate agent.
She lives in Shorecrest, a neighborhood in Miami
on the shore of Biscayne Bay.
-I really was ignorant about the king tide,
and I knew that the tide is controlled or influenced
by the moon and the full moon,
but I never realized how you could wake up
in the morning like this
and find water at the doorstep of your house
for no other reason than the tide,
and then I will find in my driveway all of the debris...
Like that, what you see here, that I have to clean up.
...because everything is literally on your house,
and it's sunny, and you don't understand.
-King tides are the higher-than-normal tides,
which usually occur during a full or new moon.
Because of rising sea level, high tides now often push up
through Miami's drainage system and onto the streets,
carrying debris along as they go.
The water might then disappear between tides
only to flood back up again 12 hours later.
-As the sea is rising, those same tides,
they're riding on higher seas,
so the water comes through those drains and pipes
and pops up in the streets.
There are some figures that say that a sea-level
rise in that area of Miami
is six times faster than the global average.
By 2030, it's expected that they will see
about 50 tidal floods a year
and, by 2045, about 250 times a year.
Yeah. Can you imagine?
-It's not seawater flooding.
It's freshwater in the aquifer stored beneath the city,
which is being pushed up by the rising tide.
-Cities like Miami are a complicated machine.
They try to keep saltwater from the ocean
from coming into the well zones,
and they recharge the groundwater from rivers
and canals.
We need the groundwater to be high,
sufficient for using it for water resources,
but not too high.
We need the rain but not too much rain,
so it's difficult to balance how they're going to maintain
a thick enough lens of freshwater
in the water table for water use
and not let the sea level push it up out of the ground.
-In Miami Beach, king-tide flooding
has increased 400 percent in the past 10 years.
The underlying reason why Miami experiences increased
flooding has to do not only with global sea-level rise
but with the city's unique foundation.
Doug Marcy has been studying sea level
for more than 20 years.
-This is a fossiliferous limestone.
It has calcium carbonate and quartz sand.
Most of southeast Florida and Miami-Dade area
is built on top of this type of limestone.
It's hard, so it's good for building
into for high-rise structures and things like that.
It's very porous as you can tell
and has a lot of these holes that are basically --
got little mini caves, if you will.
So to show you how porous this rock really is,
if I pour this seawater into the top...
...it goes right through kind of like Swiss cheese.
So groundwater doesn't flow that fast,
but the main point is,
there's no impedance to the flow here.
-Most of Miami and southern Florida
sit on this giant bed of limestone.
As the ocean levels rise,
seawater pushes up through the porous rock,
and as it continues to be forced up through the limestone,
it will infiltrate the natural freshwater aquifer.
-It actually can come up through storm drains
and close roads and cause transportation-access problems,
also can cause problems with businesses and whatnot,
so as the saltwater wedge moves in
and drinking-water wells come in contact with that,
then it'll start to become higher salinity values,
and they won't be able to use that for drinking water anymore.
-But it's not just salt contaminating Miami's
drinking water.
There's an even worse problem.
20 percent of Miami-Dade still uses septic tanks
to collect sewage,
and as the water seeps up to the surface,
it gets into those tanks,
causing the flood water to mix with the sewage inside.
-It's definitely not clear, fresh water.
It's muddy.
It's for sure contaminated, and it travels to your house,
to where your children walk barefoot.
-The City of Miami advises residents
not to come in contact with the flood water
and to wash immediately if they do.
James Murley is chief resilience officer for Miami-Dade County.
By air, he can see the problems that surround the Miami area,
problems that were right there from the beginning.
-When man intervenes in nature, you end up
with a lot of unintended consequences,
and we try to learn from the mistakes we made in the past.
-One of those mistakes
was the removal of the mangrove forests,
nature's protection for coastlines.
This is what Miami looked like before it was developed.
-All along here, everything you see green is mangrove.
Mangroves are very valuable.
They protect.
They break down the storm surge coming in.
It's must cheaper to maintain mangrove forest
than it is to build concrete.
You build concrete walls or dikes.
-The mangroves area Miami's prehistory,
which needs to be restored.
It's the city's human impact
that is destined to be destroyed.
-What we see coming up is a mobile-home park.
They were built decades ago in a time
when people thought we would keep the water out,
but now we know we can't do that.
-The most vulnerable areas are also Miami's most valuable.
Even at a glance, it's clear they will be underwater
when the ocean rises.
-This is in the city of Coral Gables.
It's their most expensive real estate.
We understand the value of this real estate
in terms of real-estate taxes,
but we also realize that those decisions we made decades ago
to allow this kind of development right on the coast,
we're not going to keep doing that.
If we were to experience a huge catastrophic storm,
then we'd have to relook at how we redevelop.
It may be better in the future
to relocate those most vulnerable areas.
-Dr. Keren Bolter is a climate scientist
who was born and raised in Miami.
She was alarmed to see how climate change
was transforming her city while being ignored by many.
-When I learned about climate change,
it blew my mind that all of these
dramatic changes were happening,
and people still were wondering whether it was a problem,
and once I had kids, I realized it was my life mission
to get people to wake up and understand what's happening.
-Bolter has modeled how sea-level rise
will affect Miami-Dade County through the next century
based on predictions from NOAA,
the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
-So these tools and this data
is a really good communication method to show what's happening.
We already see 20 days a year that just high tide,
the water is higher than the land,
and how does that increase in the future?
Two to three feet of sea-level rise basically takes
Downtown Miami, Miami Beach and puts it below sea level,
and these areas are where the movie stars live
and the famous people.
These are the low-lying areas,
but they stand out not only because of that
but because they have the resources.
This is very high property value,
the highest in all of Florida,
but if you look further north, we have these vulnerable areas.
What I did was, I actually modeled low-income populations
at low elevation, and what I found was,
there's a huge hot spot in this area.
-The hot spot is only 15 miles from Miami Beach.
Much of the population here lives below the poverty line.
-So there's a huge social vulnerability
and physical vulnerability in this kind of hot spot.
These are the people that will be truly displaced.
-My name is Eric Bason, and I'm a community activist
working around issues on climate change and sea-level rise.
-Eric Bason is among
those living in Miami's most vulnerable area.
-Well, the community is low-income communities,
and members such as myself are highly effected
because we don't have the resources when, like,
a flood happens.
I try to educate community members
about what's accessible to them.
When they're having meetings at city hall,
should make sure that they go and have their voices heard
so that more resources could come down
to help low-income communities like mine.
-What's going on? -Somebody is paying
for the roads to be fixed,
so somebody is paying for flood prevention.
-See you, man. -All right.
-People who live here want to make sure
they get their fair share of that money.
-There's a lot of money being given
for low-income communities to offset their flooding,
but it doesn't seem to go down to these communities.
When you vote for these people, you hire them,
and it's our responsibility to hold them accountable
and especially for poor people
if they plan on getting any help.
The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
It's just that simple.
-As Miami's chief resilience officer,
Jane Gilbert recognizes that low-income communities
are much more vulnerable to the rising sea.
-Just under 30 percent of the City of Miami population
is living at poverty level or less,
and I would say a little over 60 percent
have a hard time meeting basic needs,
whether it's rent or child care or transportation,
because we have very high costs
of both housing and transportation costs.
The majority of our population is having a hard time
making ends meet, so that needs to be built
into our resilience strategy as part of it.
-For all its citizens, Miami needs a plan to survive.
According to current projections,
sea-level rise will impact
Miami more than any other city in the US.
Miami could experience as much as a 3-foot rise by 2080
and as much as a 6-foot rise by 2100.
-This is an extremely frightening scenario.
It's scary to even think that, as a worst-case scenario,
it's possible, and the fact that it's possible,
we need to consider it.
And even more alarming, further south,
we happen to have right along the coastline
a nuclear power plant, Turkey Point.
All of the cooling canals in the surrounding areas
are extremely low, so there's a really big vulnerability
for the nuclear power plant.
It's a little scary for me living so close
to a nuclear power plant that is that low-lying.
-Miami-Dade Chief Resilience Officer James Murley
is also worried about Turkey Point.
-So the plant was built there in 1976,
and it's cooled by a large area of cooling canals.
Those probably wouldn't be the way
we would permit it today,
but, you know, that's what we had to live with.
We'd like to have cooling towers.
That may be in the future, but that's where we are.
-Miami is also considered the most at-risk
city worldwide for potential property damage
due to rising sea level and storm-related flooding.
More than $416 billion in real estate is at risk here.
-If you look at Downtown Miami right now,
you see crane after crane after crane,
and you see new construction after new construction,
gleaming towers rising out of the bay.
You think to yourself, "Wait a second.
Who's buying this? Who's selling?
Aren't these people crazy?
How can they be plunking this amount of money into it?"
We're going to get probably 2 feet of sea-level
rise by 2060, and by 2100, we might get 6 feet of water,
and none of this construction is, by law,
required to take into account
that sea-level rise within its design.
-So we have to look at infrastructure.
We have to look at building and land-use codes,
and we have to do a lot around citizen-resident outreach,
education, information.
♪♪
-If Miami Beach is underwater within the next century,
these buildings are doomed.
-How much is the real estate in Miami Beach
worth when the beach is gone?
So I think that Miami Beach goes eventually.
If you look at the incomes of people in Miami,
Miami Beach, North Miami,
the high-income zone is still along the saltwater shore zone.
-It's only a matter of time before these houses,
along with their mortgages, end up underwater.
-But when your bathroom doesn't work anymore,
can your house retain its value?
Somebody has to give them the economic signal
that those properties are losing value.
Until they feel it, like, the bank says to them,
"You know what? Your house isn't worth the mortgage
that you have for it,"
so we'll see what happens to a lot of people
as this slower-moving trend starts to become a real issue
in the very thin crust of infrastructure in Miami.
-Today, developers continue to build
on Miami's most vulnerable ground,
and buyers keep demanding those condos with a view,
but developers are focused on the immediate future,
not beyond.
There's no long-range plan other than build, sell, repeat.
-So are these pieces of real estate
the equivalent of junk bonds?
Are these investments that people are never
going to see a return on?
At some point, the Miami real-estate market
is going to really have to start integrating accurately
the price of rising sea levels into how much stuff costs.
-That may already be happening.
A recent study found that houses on the coast
now sell for seven percent less than houses in the interior,
but what isn't changing is the high demand for property here.
-So who's buying in Miami?
Well, the honest answer is that, sometimes, we really don't know.
Miami has two property markets.
One is the market for people like you and me
who are looking for a place to live,
and the other is the market for the world's one percent.
They're looking for a place to plunk their money.
Something like two-thirds of the properties in the city
are actually owned by limited-liability corporations
whose providence is opaque.
We don't know who owns these places.
It's a great haven for offshore funny money
from developing countries
and people trying to escape taxes in those places,
putting money in Miami.
-Miami is no stranger
to resourceful if not shady business deals.
Its very inception was a huge risk.
-If you look at Miami-Dade County today,
you've got millions of people living in what was the swamp.
This map depicts Florida at the time of 1835 to 1842.
The Everglades was massive.
It measured from Lake Okeechobee down to Florida Bay,
about 4 million acres of swampland.
There were mosquitoes everywhere, so again,
there's just really nobody here.
There's really -- Other than the coastal area,
there's no place you can really live.
You can't live in the swamp.
-In 1891, an Ohio businesswoman named Julia Tuttle moved there
and began lobbying another Ohioan, Henry Flagler,
to extend his railroad to the coast.
Flagler enlisted Bohemian and other migrant workers
to build the railway,
which reached the Atlantic coast by 1896.
Then, in the early 1900s,
another entrepreneur from the north, Carl G. Fisher,
arrived and really got things going.
Fisher cut down the mangrove forests
and dredged sand from the bottom of the bay to fill the swamp.
Miami Beach was born.
Carl Fisher turned a swamp into a dream,
and almost immediately, Miami's fragile beginnings crack
with the arrival of a devastating storm.
[ Thunder rumbles ]
-The Miami hurricane of 1926,
it did tremendous destruction to the area.
The damage was unreal.
An estimated 10,000 people were homeless
and thousands of structures uninhabitable at the time.
The flooding was incredibly severe.
-Over 300 people died in that 1926 hurricane.
Adjusted for inflation,
it caused more than $100 billion worth of damage.
[ Waves crashing ]
Hurricanes hit Florida from June to November every year,
but the biggest storm of all still strikes fear
into the hearts of South Floridians,
Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
It's a night that changed the lives
of Miami's Petersen family.
-The evening before the storm hit, we were --
-I think we were at a store.
-We were out to dinner, I believe.
-Something, but... -And then...
-...we didn't take it as seriously.
-...we heard the news,
was on maybe the television that was in the restaurant,
and it said that Hurricane Andrew
has taken a severe turn to the west.
-But Hurricane Andrew suddenly changed course and intensified,
confounding the experts.
The state quickly called for an evacuation of more
than a million residents.
-The police came, and they said,
"If you're not leaving, give us next of kin, please," so --
-That kind of sealed the deal.
-But the Petersens, unable to move quickly enough,
found themselves trapped in their home
with no way to protect their young son.
-This is Bryan. He was 4.
-So get in your closets.
Put the mattresses over the opening of the closet
and protect yourself from any debris
when your windows break, and your windows will break.
-I remember my dad having to carry me on his shoulders,
the water being so high that it was up to his chest,
and me sitting on his shoulders, I could feel it on my toes,
and I'll never forget how cold the water was.
I remember the roof being gone.
I remember the entire neighborhood
looked like somebody had just flattened it
out of a pop-up book.
-And I remember my son saying,
"You can go through a hurricane and think you die."
Just -- -Yes.
-Because we put pillows on him in case any --
It was scary, still bring tears to me.
-A wall of seawater rushed in.
173-mile-per-hour winds
sent deadly debris hurtling through the air.
-The middle of the night while we were watching out the window,
we saw the green lightning,
which wasn't really green lightning.
It was the power substations exploding.
[ Explosion in distance ]
-Andrew left Miami in ruins, 25,000 houses destroyed,
more than 100,000 others damaged.
It left 15 people dead.
-The building code had been insufficient
for that type of a windstorm,
so structures were built in a way
that the roofs weren't capable, you know, flew right off.
There was plenty evidence of what we needed to do
to tighten up our building code and other standards.
-The damages were enormous, totaling $27 billion,
enough to put eight insurance companies out of business.
At the time, it was the most expensive natural disaster
to strike the United States,
only surpassed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Now, as sea levels rise, the storm surge experienced
when Andrew hit would be even more devastating.
A quarter century later,
Miami is still not fully prepared.
♪♪
September 7, 2017 --
Hurricane Irma barreled toward Miami.
It was the ninth named storm of the year for this area.
-We were thinking of water surge of,
I don't know, 20, 30 feet,
which means, I mean, it's a whole house.
It's gone. I was prepared for the worst.
-Facing the prospect of a category 5,
the most intense storm possible,
Miami did the only thing it could, evacuate.
♪♪
Irma battered the city with powerful winds.
Water poured into the streets.
Nearly the entire city went dark.
♪♪
In the aftermath of that storm,
Miami was forced to reckon with catastrophic damage.
-This road was completely flooded, completely.
We're talking 2 feet height of water.
-But the most shocking fact
was that Irma didn't even hit Miami directly.
It shifted course at the last second.
Now even near misses are leaving Miami underwater.
One of Florida's biggest challenges
is a hurricane phenomenon called rapid intensification.
All Atlantic hurricanes start near Africa,
and most grow or dissipate
predictably as they make the crossing,
but as they approach the Gulf of Mexico,
they encounter warmer waters.
Together, with other weather conditions, such as wind shear,
rapid intensification becomes deadly,
and as forecasters know,
it's almost impossible to predict.
-Nightmare scenario is the storm that intensifies rapidly
and catches people by surprise.
-Brian Haus does research in an attempt
to predict rapid intensification with more accuracy.
-The relatively simple explanation is but,
you know, it's the heat coming off the ocean.
The heat takes the form of the temperature,
the sensible heat, we call it, and then
the more critical component for development of a hurricane
is the latent heat, the water that is evaporated,
so I think that's probably the part that may be not as well
understood is really the evaporation at the surface.
Then it's also slowed down by the interaction
with the ocean itself, the waves on the ocean.
That's the friction that it's spinning over.
-Despite centuries of hurricane research,
predicting rapid intensification is still next to impossible.
Cracking that code may help preserve Miami's future.
-And you need to know these things as soon as possible
because you can't make these decisions at the last minute
in a place where four million other people
are making the same decision as you,
and there's two roads to get out,
so the sooner we can get good forecasts
that everybody can trust,
the sooner people can make intelligent choices
about whether they're evacuating their house,
to what level they protect their house.
-A wave generator at the Rosenstiel School of Marine
and Atmospheric Sciences allows Haus to collect data
he can't get from real hurricanes.
-What's unique about our facility here is,
we can take a decently sized chunk of water,
and we can recreate controlled hurricane conditions
over the top of that chunk of water
and really try to understand
what happens right at the interface,
and we can use that information in computer models
to predict the intensity of the storm.
A lot of these processes,
the heat transfer and the spray generation,
all that, are really happening at small scales.
We can create those conditions here,
and we can understand what's happening
right at the interface, this spray that's coming off
and how that contributes to the transfers of heat
up into the storm
and also how it contributes to the way
that the storm feels the friction of the surface.
We can generate a wind up
to a really intense category-5 hurricane,
up to 200 miles an hour.
This interface between the air and the water
where a lot of the action happens,
you see all the spray that's starting to be generated here
at these intense conditions that just explode up into the air.
-Haus has learned that sea spray
is a key component of intensification.
When wind kicks up the spray, the heat in it
is transferred to the atmosphere above.
That heat helps fuel the storm.
-There is a significant increase in the amount
of rapid intensification.
This year, it happened with almost every hurricane.
Miami has a lot to worry about in the future.
-Stronger and more frequent hurricanes,
gradual loss of the most exclusive shoreline in Florida,
sunny-day flooding through porous limestone bedrock --
These are the problems Miami faces.
To survive, Miami needs to adapt and to find new solutions
or risk being lost to the rising sea.
♪♪
The development along Miami's shores
is still primarily vertical towers rising out
of its Swiss-cheese-limestone foundation.
However, an increasing number of them
are designed with resilience in mind.
-So if you're talking about a dense urban downtown
where you have lots of high-rises,
you can invest in infrastructure to raise things,
build strong flood barriers and pump and piping systems
and raise roads over time to live with that water.
-With our project, Grove at Grand Bay,
we raised the terra firma,
or the ground level, 20 feet into the air.
-The Grove at Grand Bay is one of dozens
of condos being built on the water in Miami,
but it's not like any condo that came before it.
Project leader Kai Uwe-Bergmann's design
is part of Miami's ambitious new building code
for the 21st century.
-Because of sea-level rise,
the city is literally acknowledging
that that will occur and that properties
that are being developed now actually move higher.
-All-new developments along the city's coast
must be raised by almost 13 feet.
They must also be built to withstand flooding without
being crippled in the event of a 15-foot storm surge.
-The plan does stipulate
that any of the sort of mechanical rooms
are above the flood stage or, in this case, the ground floor.
-Miami's plan is just a Band-Aid
in the face of rising seas.
The city needs to look much further into the future
if it hopes to survive the inevitable.
-So we have a citizen sea-level-rise
advisory committee that is made up of engineers,
ecosystem naturalists, land-use attorney, architect, developer,
someone representing some of our low-income communities,
and they're advising us on public policies,
advising our commission on how to approach it.
-But it'll take much more than committees and consultations
to stop the water that's already at Miami's doorstep.
-You can't escape it.
Water is coming from the side, from below, from above,
and I think Miami is at that point
where they've got to decide,
"How do we solve the issues of sea-level rise?"
I do, however, think that we as humans,
if we're posed a challenge and there's a way to solve it,
we will find the energy, the resources to do it.
♪♪
-While coastal real estate
has always been Miami-Dade's most desirable,
some buyers now prefer higher ground
where they won't be as affected by flooding,
whether from storm surge or from rising sea level.
The term climate gentrification has been coined to describe
how some people move away from the shore
into traditionally less desirable lower-income
neighborhoods.
-Liberty City is a predominantly African-American
and Latino community.
When they originally built Miami,
the beach was supposed to be for the affluent, tourists
and things like that, so we were not allowed to be on the beach.
Because of racism and redlining,
they pushed us to the center of the city...
♪♪
...and now they're trying to take it away
after all these years
when they didn't want it because the place that they love so much
is going to be underwater.
We're starting to see a lot of developers come in
and buy up blocks at a time, taking over communities.
-The gentrification that's been transforming neighborhoods
across America has taken a unique twist in Miami.
-Climate-change gentrification in Miami
would be funny if it weren't so sad.
It's the sort of thing where, because of redlining and racist
housing practices historically in the United States,
you have minorities being confined
to the less desirable areas on the coastal ridge
away from the nice beaches
and the nice sea breezes and stuff,
and now that everybody is realizing,
"Like, hey, man, this whole beach thing
might not really work out while the water is rising,"
these areas have been gentrified in an amazingly rapid rate.
-My family has been in Miami for generations.
-Gunder is worried that climate-change gentrification
will force her and her neighbors from their homes
and erase a vital part of Miami's culture.
-My family has been in Overtown.
They've been in Liberty City.
They've been in Lemon City, been in Little Haiti for years.
My Miami is the west side of the causeway
where the cameras usually don't come
or people don't think about when they think about Miami.
My Miami is everyday working people,
hundreds of cultures, children playing outside.
It doesn't look like South Beach.
It's not lined with beautiful palm trees
and million-dollar hotels and a beautiful, clean beach.
Even though we're 15 minutes away from the beach,
I can name hundreds of people who've never been there,
and they've been here their entire lives.
-60 percent of Miami is living paycheck
to paycheck to paycheck,
and fully 66 percent of the city rents.
They don't own their house.
-Which leaves people like Valencia Gunder no choice
but to move to a more vulnerable area
as the money moves into her neighborhood.
-Now all of the working-class families in Miami
or most are being pushed to lower-lying areas,
so if you have a sunny-day flooding
or even a very rainy incident, it's going to take you twice
as long to get from your house to work.
That's a cost on society.
That's a burden.
-Rich or poor, officials in Miami face the challenge
of making sure everyone
is protected from Miami's rising sea.
-We are currently designing infrastructure
for the next 40 to 50 years
to 2, 2 1/2 feet of sea-level rise over that time.
We don't know what's going to happen
in the next 40 to 50 years.
Projections are going to change.
We're going to have to recalibrate our projections
every 5 years based on new scientific information.
Policy can happen.
Technology can happen, and frankly, you know,
most cities, a long-range plan is a 20-year plan.
We're doing a 40-to-50-year plan.
-Miami Beach is fighting sea-level rise on three fronts
with one of the most ambitious public-works projects
in the United States.
♪♪
-This is a very exciting time for an engineer
to actually see what they've designed
and actually seeing it actually come together.
[ Indistinct conversation ]
-When Bruce Mowry was the chief engineer of Miami Beach,
he had the Herculean task of keeping the most vulnerable area
in all of Miami dry.
♪♪
He oversaw the installation of a series of pumps
along Indian Creek Drive
following a canal just west of the beach.
It's part of a huge new pumping system.
-We have a total of about 70,
so we're going to be building about 40 more pump stations
throughout the city over the next 3 to 5 years.
This will sustain a much drier street for us
and a better quality of life
for our residents and businesses.
-The pumps are part of a $500 million initiative
to send seawater from the streets into the nearby
canals at a rate of about 5 million gallons per minute,
reducing the impact of king tides.
Miami's first challenge is to get all that water
out of the city and back into Biscayne Bay.
-And the way that it works is, after the pump station treats
the water collected from the entire drainage system,
that pump station pushes the water
through an underground system
and discharges into the bay after treating it.
-The water from the pump station gets sent
to a treatment station south of the city's core
where it gets purified with waste held in tanks.
The clean water then gets pumped back into Biscayne Bay.
-We can't retreat 1 inch.
We don't have any land available to say,
"We'll let that part go."
We need to defend at the waterfront now.
-The second front of the plan involves raising seawalls
along Miami's canals and creeks.
-This wall was constructed approximately 75 years ago,
and this was the level of which they were anticipating tides
or high waters to come in.
During high tide, water will actually come over it,
and so we're looking at a wall well over 4,
almost 5 feet higher than the existing walls
built 75 to 100 years ago.
We believe it's necessary
because of what to be expected sea-level rise,
that this is going to be our standard requirements.
This is a very direct indication of how climate change
and sea-level rise is changing the conditions in this world.
-But because of Miami's porous foundation,
even Miami's chief resilience officer, Jane Gilbert,
is skeptical that raising seawalls
is an effective long-term solution.
-Even if you have the barrier there,
the water comes up from behind
and creates its own flooding event,
so we need to learn over time to live with that water.
-Living with the reality of rising water requires
a third front in the battle, something far more radical.
-What the city has done is,
they actually went into some of those low-lying streets
and started raising them incrementally.
Now what we're raising today may not be the final elevation
50 to 100 years from now,
but it's not appropriate to try to raise
in a developed city all at one time.
-The greatest challenge in Miami Beach
is the substrate of our soil.
We live on a barrier island made out of limestone,
coral and sand.
The water is coming up as much as it's coming over any seawall,
and if we don't elevate our land
and literally have our infrastructure above the water,
it's going to come in and flood anyway.
-The best example of elevation can be found
in Miami Beach's Sunset Harbour neighborhood.
-This was the most vulnerable area
of our community at the time.
The area we're standing in now during high-tide events
would be water in the streets.
We literally see people kayaking in the streets.
It was so low, so we started here,
and this area was raised 30 inches in many spots.
-This restaurant's patio was once popular
for people-watching.
Now its tables are below street level.
-The elevation difference between where I'm standing
and what you can see
was the original elevation of the sidewalks and streets,
so when we finished these neighborhoods,
we bring soil in from the mainland.
We installed underground pipes.
We'll build our roadbed, our drainage structure
and pave the road, and it'll be 30 inches higher.
-Sunset Harbour is a 6-block neighborhood in South Beach.
Raising the streets there took 2 years and $27 million.
-That's 2 years of roads blocked,
lot of dust from road construction, noise,
just interrupting normal life routine, but the bottom line --
They suffer 2 years to rebuild a community like this
in exchange for 30 years of security.
-Many believe it's too little too late
and that a 30-year life span is too short
before the rising seas force Miami Beach
to do it all over again.
♪♪
-The problem is that sea-level rise is going to continue,
so raising your city is kind of like walking a plank.
It works as long as you don't get to the end of it,
and the sea-level-rise dynamic is going to continue,
so I don't think they can raise themselves out of the problem
maybe more than 3, 5 feet, and even with that,
they have to be ready for serious hurricanes
and the more extreme rainfall events project for the future,
which are raising their groundwater,
and that's a very important piece of the flooding problem.
-One of Hill's strategies for living with rising groundwater
has already been tested in the Netherlands.
-I think that we can use earthworks,
landforms to structure areas that are safe where water ponds,
and then we can float urban districts in those safe ponds.
I'm not talking about floating stuff in the Atlantic Ocean.
And the Dutch idea of canals is a great one
because it mostly relies on gravity to drain groundwater
out of high-water-table zones, but that would be a way
for us to adapt to living with more water.
-Miami-Dade Chief Resilience Officer James Murley
has looked at the Dutch model of building dikes,
canals and levies but doesn't think that it will work in Miami
due to its unique geology.
-The idea of building dikes or levies with the porous limestone
means that they're not going to be nearly as efficient
as dikes and levies in other parts of the country.
They will have an effect of lessening
an onrushing storm surge, but the water itself
is going to go right underneath through the lime rock
and is going to raise the freshwater water table,
and, you know, it's a situation that is unique to our geology,
and we have to work with that as we move forward.
-You can elevate houses. You can elevate buildings.
You can elevate roads.
People are doing it all over the country, all over the world.
They're elevating whole buildings,
but can you elevate all of the buildings of Miami Beach?
I don't know, and if you elevate it
and the limestone underneath is all full of saltwater,
you're going to have to pump water from way inland,
so there are all these things that you have to consider.
-The City of Miami Beach is committed
and planning to overcome the challenges long-term,
no matter what the cost.
-All the South Florida people are very strong-willed,
resilient people.
The people in this community, in Miami Beach,
have determined that retreat from sea-level rise
is not an option at this point.
We will rise above, and we will stay.
♪♪
-One building here is a shining example
of what Miami could do to face the future.
The Pérez Art Museum opened in 2013
when the reality of a sinking storm-battered Miami
became accepted by most residents.
The museum's designers faced that challenge head-on.
-Here, we're standing on the south side of PAMM,
the Pérez Art Museum Miami, right at our front doors.
To the east of me is Biscayne Bay.
We are a modern art museum.
The art starts at 22 feet above sea level
with the second level of art being at 40 feet
above sea level.
The materials that were used are unbelievably solid
to withstand major weather conditions.
Certainly the concrete throughout the entire structure,
any wood that was used on the building could sustain
both wind and water.
-While the structural materials defend
against sea level and storms,
other features work with water, ushering it into cisterns
that are used to irrigate the grounds
and then funneling any access water
quickly back out to the bay.
-As we're walking toward the east of our building,
you'll notice that the ground that we're walking on
are basically like concrete planks.
That's to allow water to flow underneath the structure
to the PAMM garage.
We're at exactly 8 feet above sea level at level zero
in the PAMM garage.
We have a gravel surface here, and the idea behind this
was to allow the water to drain as quickly as possible.
So we do have a generator,
so PAMM will never be without power,
and I think about PAMM a lot of times like a hospital
that we have art that is living and breathing
and needs 70-degree temperature,
50-percent humidity at all times and allows the art to be safe.
-The Pérez Art Museum proved its worth during Irma.
-We've learned a lot.
We've changed our procedures over the years,
but the building has sustained no damage since we've moved in.
We would never change our location.
We wear it as a badge.
-The big storm is more frightening
than the gradual rise of water.
Absolutely, and that's why we respond so intensely
to the big storm and the hurricanes.
It's a natural response.
-According to Caldas,
Miamians should be less concerned about hurricanes
and more worried about sea-level rise.
-It is more important to consider tidal flooding
than it is hurricanes.
Hurricane can come or cannot come,
but the tide comes in every day.
It's only getting worse.
The measurements are there. The data are there.
It's only going to get worse and fast.
So we have three options.
We protect.
We try to build berms and walls in different areas.
We accommodate the water.
We build areas that can flood without damage,
or we retreat, which is the, you know,
the last-resort thing that you have to do.
If your place has been flooded 250 times a year,
it's, like, it's time to leave.
We got to get out of here.
-You start thinking, "Okay. What if I don't have my car?
What if I don't have my job?" because if there's no houses
to sell, no condos to sell, that's my livelihood.
What if I don't have a home to return to?
-What we found is,
people are going to ask for the opportunity to retreat.
They weren't being told to leave.
They were saying, "We prefer to leave."
They were willing to sell their property and move.
That could change in the future,
but that's sort of where we find ourselves today,
so there's a lot of thinking going on.
There's a lot of different options being considered.
-Everybody is doom and gloom.
They're all saying, "Sea-level rise, climate change
is going to be the end of all coastal communities.
You'll never, ever be able to save the City of Miami Beach,"
and I'm saying, "No, that doesn't have to be."
We got to solve problems.
We can't just talk about how bad they are
and how much worse they're going to get.
We have to also talk about what we're going to do to correct it.
-Eric Bason says he will stand his ground, no matter what.
-I'm not planning on moving.
I plan on fighting for people in my community,
low-income communities to live the best life possible.
-I would say that I'm more hopeful than I am worried.
Maybe that's just because I'm an optimistic,
positive person,
but I do see humanity in a way that there's so much potential,
and there's so much innovation.
There are solutions that we don't even know exist,
and once we have the willpower,
the movement, we're going to find them,
and America, the world is not going to let Miami go.
♪♪
-To order "Sinking Cities" on DVD,
visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video.
♪♪