Nature took its revenge on the people responsible for taming floodwaters in Florida.
As coastal engineers and state and local flood management officials converged on downtown Miami yesterday for this year’s Florida Floodplain Managers Association conference at the Marriott Biscayne Bay hotel, the skies opened and unleashed a torrent of rain.
Downtown streets soon flooded, leaving some attendees unable to reach the hotel. “I had to turn around so as not to flood my vehicle,” said Stephen Boehring, an engineer who heads the firm Coastal Waterways Design & Engineering. “It was the middle of a downpour so the water really had no other place to go.”
Local residents have grown accustomed to flooding in downtown and Brickell, where the streets can become impassable, even without a hurricane or tropical storm. Last June, the water left dozens of cars awash and inoperable. Blame the area’s low elevation, which makes it hard for water to drain into the swollen Miami River especially after water levels have risen during heavy rains.
Local governments across South Florida are spending millions of dollars on pumps to push water out to sea faster during storms to prevent flooding. But sea level rise is making it harder for pumps and canals to work against gravity to clear rainwater off the streets.
Flood managers across Florida are dealing with similar challenges. “This is the whole reason for why we do what we do,” said Conn Cole, floodplain manager for the state of Florida. “Here’s a simple rain event, not storm related, and Miami’s got shallow flooding. This is day-to-day stuff: streets flooding, cars getting flooded. It can happen anytime.”
Although this kind of rainfall flooding can happen any time, it seems to happen more frequently when flood managers gather, according to Josh Overmyer, a former chair of the Florida Floodplain Managers Association.
Overmyer also belongs to a national group called the Association of State Floodplain Managers, which hosts conferences around the country. “It used to be a running joke that everywhere we took the conference, it flooded,” he said. “Atlanta in 2015 flooded. Kansas City in 2017 flooded. It’s too often to be a coincidence. We’re the drought busters.”
This climate report is funded by Florida International University, the Knight Foundation and the David and Christina Martin Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald retains editorial control of all content.
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