Doesn't Fort Lauderdale Get Global Warming?

[blueherons]

I just put on my foil beanie to keep the aliens from sending brain waves to me and hide under my bed.

[HotandHumid]

The Sun Sentinel today reported on their front page that there were record levels of coastal flooding in 2017 and it's expected to be worse in 2018 due to sea level rise.

One of the posters on this thread commented that Miami Beach is landfill and sits low so it's prone to flooding. Many parts of Fort Lauderdale are also low lying parcels of dredged up landfill and there's already been some coastal high tide flooding from sea water coming up through the drains in some of the residential neighborhoods off of Las Olas Boulevard.

This area used to be part of that gigantic super swamp, The Everglades, and developers, along with government help, dredged up large areas of the Everglades to create the land that many of the neighborhoods of Fort Lauderdale now sit on, along with creating the waterways of canals connected to the rivers that surround much of the area and make it so prone to flooding since high tides travel up the rivers and into the low lying residential areas by way of canals that were built so developers could call so many homes, "waterfront."

I think it's always interesting that someone brings up the matter of earthquakes and tries to equate them with the same amount of property damage that hurricanes do. Sure there was that big quake in San Francisco in the early 1900's but most of the damage there was done by fires from gas line breaks. If you read up on the history of earthquakes in the U.S., you'll find that you can't really compare earthquakes to hurricanes since earthquakes are always centralized in a relatively small area and don't create wide areas of mass destruction like hurricanes do such as when hurricanes this past summer hit Puerto Rico, Cuba, several parts of other Caribbean islands, the lower Florida Keys and South Florida and the west coast of Florida. And let's not forget about the damage from Hurricane Andrew in South Florida and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

If you look at a map showing the path and frequency of hurricanes that have hit Florida in the past decades, you'll soon understand why Florida is number one in the U.S. for states where natural disasters have occurred, primarily because of the hurricanes that have made landfall in Florida in almost every decade and sometimes several times during a decade.

Some people seem to be fooling themselves into believing that the Fort Lauderdale area is immune to the destruction that was seen in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, yet most of Puerto Rico sits at a much higher elevation than Fort Lauderdale so most of Puerto Rico did not see the storm surge and coastal flooding that would cover much of this waterway covered area if a hurricane like Andrew, Maria or Irma hit Fort Lauderdale with it's full force instead of just with storm feeder bands that we've been lucky to get instead of a direct hit during hurricanes such as Wilma and Irma.

Several of my older friends who have decided to stay here have moved out of ground level homes and apartments into high rise buildings in an attempt to at least avoid being flooded out of their homes when the next hurricane hits here. I didn't save the money I had hoped to get out of Florida this summer but I hope to to so before the start of the hurricane season in the summer of 2019.

[StarryKnight1]

Remember Hurricane Sandy? A1A from about Sunrise to just before OPB was covered in sand and debris. That should show how vulnerable this area is to Global Warming

[BNBR]

Global warming is coming!! Hurry, get out!!!

[pompano33065]

I have lived in South Florida since 1979-1980 and everywhere I have ever lived in South Florida has flooded practically daily between 3:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. when the rain pours down often only on one side of the street or block etc. The streets flood, swales flood, parking lots flood. So for at least thirty-eight years I have seen this which is well before anyone used the term, "global warming".

[HotandHumid]

I've had a storage unit at U-Haul for several years now for my business and I've gotten to know the staff pretty well so I asked them if more people were renting trucks and moving out of the area or if more trucks were coming in from people moving into the area since U-Haul gives a free month of storage on one way rentals.

I was told that a lot more people are renting trucks to move out of the area and that people moving out have commented to staff members that they wished they had never moved here or that they were born here and are glad to be leaving.

Since the area is not losing population by the statistics on the population here, it looks to me from my weekly rounds around the city going to the stores, shopping malls, flea markets, thrift shops, etc., that the population numbers are staying stable here because of the large number of immigrants moving into the area as one can frequently hear Spanish and that alteration of French that the Haitians speak.

The latest available statistics on the population in the city of Fort Lauderdale state it's about 60% white but I would imagine that's not the case with some of the surrounding cities, as African-American friends of mine said that they won't go to the areas near 441 anymore because they said it doesn't feel safe there with the large immigrant populations that has moved into that area, primarily from the Caribbean area.

Wilton Manors has a large Gay population that's moved here in recent years but it's mostly an older, wealthier crowd that can pay the high housing costs in that city so a lot of the younger Gays have moved away to places where there are better job markets as low paying service industry jobs are pretty much the norm here.

There are lots of new apartment buildings going up in the downtown area of Fort Lauderdale but I get the feeling these are filled primarily with part-time residents who use them as vacation places for themselves and members of their extended families since there are no new office buildings going up downtown for people to work in and a large number of the businesses in the central core of downtown Fort Lauderdale have closed down, such as was the case with the Riverwalk at Las Olas shopping complex which has been demolished and apartments are going up on the land.

I've spoken with several people I've met who grew up here and they've commented that it's become too expensive for them to stay here and that they don't feel all that comfortable in their workplaces because although the staff will speak to the customers in English, when they are not with customers, they speak in their first languages instead of in English, even though the American born co-workers don't speak those languages.

[bmw335xi]

Fort Lauderdale cannot change rising seas. This is a global impact some natural some man-made, look at China, India, etc. Fort Lauderdale could be destroyed to rubble and it wouldn’t effect the sea level. Fort Lauderdale could do more to raise roads, build seawalls, figure ways to improve drainage... but to think Fort Lauderdale cars make a difference on rising sea levels is laughable.

With that being said, it’s still good to do more to protect the environment and lessen air pollution, etc.

[HotandHumid]

I was in the Coral Ridge neighborhood recently just west of Federal Highway off 26th Street and there was water bubbling up through some rainwater drains there that sit close to the river that goes under Federal Highway just south of the streets there on a sunny day with no rain.

It was high tide and since the rivers and canals are connected to the ocean by way of the Intracoastal, the river was flowing backwards upstream and some of the water was coming up through the rainwater drains. That didn't used to happen that much here but it's becoming more common with rising sea levels.

We're seeing more and more street flooding during the increasingly heavy rains that one local described as, "like a high pressure fire hose aimed at my roof," because the rainwater drains are full of water in some areas during high tide and there's nowhere for the water to drain during those more frequent heavy rainstorms so the streets and yards flood.

Some people have been digging ditches next to the streets so that the water will drain into the ditches instead of flooding their yards.

[Donald001]

Very interesting study on rising seas and chronic floods:
https://arcg.is/1aXHrb0