News Brief by Kip Hansen — 7 June 2024
The headline reads:
Their Florida ‘Paradise’ Keeps Flooding, but Some Can’t Afford a Solution
“In the Shore Acres neighborhood of St. Petersburg, rising water has become a constant threat. Many residents cannot afford to elevate their homes or move.”
Patricia Mazzei, reporting from St. Petersburg, Florida, for the New York Times, writes a heart-rending story about the poor-rich-people living in a “Paradise”, in a neighborhood with an average home value of $843,000, where most of the homes have boats and yachts tied to the dock in their convenient backyard canal.
Sometimes, especially when Gulf hurricanes hit Florida’s west coast, this neighborhood floods. In some parts of the neighborhood, high tide flooding of some streets and backyards occurs.
This is almost entirely a pictorial news brief. Readers can view just these four images and discuss the cause of the grief of these poor rich people:
“Preliminary results reveal that subsidence occurs in localized patches (< 0.02 km2) with magnitude of up to 3 mm yr−1, in urban areas built on reclaimed marshland. These results suggest that contribution of local land subsidence affect only small areas along the southeast Florida coast, but in those areas coastal flooding hazard is significantly higher compared to non-subsiding areas.” — Land subsidence contribution to coastal flooding hazard in southeast Florida Wdowinski et al. (2020)
![](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Shore-Acres-from-space.jpg?resize=720%2C700&ssl=1)
![](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Shore-Acres-Google-Earth-720x567.jpg?resize=720%2C567&ssl=1)
![](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/shore-acres-HomeValues.jpg?resize=720%2C543&ssl=1)
“Mr. Batdorf, a real estate broker, said people were still buying in the neighborhood, even if only to demolish and rebuild. He likened the situation to when Tropical Storm Josephine flooded Shore Acres in 1996. Mr. Batdorf walked through knee-deep water back then to make sure a house his clients wanted had not flooded. The flooding did not detract the buyers. …. “I wrote the contract that day, in the water,” he said. “People love living here. It’s the convenience of where it is. It’s paradise.” — NY Times
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
Florida is famous for its vices and one of them, just to pick one out of the oh-so-many, is Miami’s Vice. Untold thousands of homes are built along the coasts of Florida within one to three feet of average high tide, with canals to bring the sea close to the homes – as in ‘just there, across the backyard’.
Global Sea Levels, are believed to be rising, on average, at a rate of about 1 foot (0.3 meters) per century as the Earth slowly warms up a bit out of the Little Ice Age, which ended sometime between 1750 and 1850 (opinions vary). There is every reason to believe that the sea will continue to rise, at that rate, maybe a tiny bit faster, for the foreseeable future, at least until the Earth begins to cool once more.
The rich and foolish continue to build homes and entire cities in places which they must know are in harm’s way – in threat of damage and destruction from the sea and its storms, which are driven by the incredibly powerful chaotic interactive processes of the atmosphere and the oceans.
Thanks for reading.
# # # # #
Related