Officials try to keep south Florida's lush seaside life above the tide

Christa Marshall in E&E news: With its fast food restaurants, churches and strip malls, [Hallandale Beach] in southeast Florida looks like much of America. But on a sunny day last month, city official Hector Castro talked about its resemblance to Italy's slowly sinking Venice.

"At some point in the future, some places may be uninhabitable," said Castro, director of the city Department of Public Works, Utilities and Engineering. "Maybe people could live in the top part of buildings. But what do you do about the roads?"

Much of the job of coping with the rigors and risks of climate change will fall to the leaders of major cities around the world. This series will show how some of them are already beginning to plan for looming political, financial and behavioral challenges. These predictions about an underwater city may sound dire, but officials here say they already are changing infrastructure with climate change in mind.

Recent storms battered the 4.4-square-mile city -- which sits about 7 miles north of North Miami Beach -- to such a degree that some homes were abandoned for the first time, said Castro, looking at photographs of cars floating in a parking lot. It was the kind of heavy rainfall that could become more frequent with climate change, even though scientists say no one weather event can be tied to warming temperatures.

Simultaneously, the city's freshwater supply is being contaminated by saltwater intrusion -- a problem that was not created by climate change, but that is likely being accelerated by it, according to researchers. So city officials are spending some $16 million to upgrade their stormwater system, and to move the city's entire drinking supply to the west to get out of the way of the ocean. It is a temporary fix for a problem that is projected to get worse as time goes on.

"We are the canary in the coal mine with climate change," said Hallandale Commissioner Keith London, a ponytailed, athletic politician who attends hydrology work groups in his spare time. Canary or not, Hallandale Beach is a symbol of several water problems looming over southeast Florida. Its infrastructure and size may be different from Miami or Key West, but the challenges are the same....

August, 21, 2005. The day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on South Florida. Shot taken in Hallendale Beach by Florida guy 128, Wikimedia Commons, public domain