Surfside Condo Collapse - Fluke, One-Off or the Future of Coastal Erosion

 S. Florida by 2100                                   June collapse of Surfside, Fl condo

The Verge, 12/31/2015

“What building is going to be next?” 

Local Surfside real estate agent.

Anyone who has been in the Miami area during a hard rain knows as rather common and obvious: streets are getting more and more flooded, more frequently, as the years pass. The above map suggests that not only will that flooding become permanent in the foreseeable future, but it will also become vastly bigger unless engineers can figure out how to wall off Southern Florida a la the dike system in the Netherlands. Good luck on getting a mortgage for more than 15 years for Miami and adjacent real estate. 

There’s a similar story all over the world as cyclones, hurricanes and rising oceans introduce us to our future via storm surges, letting us know how quickly such changes can invade. I keep thinking about all those who are unwilling to be inconvenienced by the sacrifices we must make to have a shot at containing global warming… to those who are simply waiting for the climate to recycle to what they perceive as normal. The changes seem to be happening much faster than even most experts predicted. Trillions and trillions of dollars of prime coastal real estate all over the world will disappear with a likelihood of a vast number of human casualties along the way.

Does the foreboding of a 2018 engineering report to the Surfside homeowner’s association tell us that there were problems with this particular condominium? Or that nearby buildings of similar construction are equally at risk? Or is this yet another canary in the global warming coal mine with a much bigger story to tell? Jenny Jarvie, writing for the June 30th Los Angeles Times, digs a little deeper: “Many residents and second-home owners in the tiny coastal city of Surfside, just a few miles northeast of Miami, spoke of being unnerved about their future on this barrier island.

“The cause of the Champlain’s sudden and spectacular fall Thursday [6/24] remained undetermined. Some engineering experts say the collapse may have been due to a rare confluence of structural deficiencies and lack of maintenance in a coastal area where buildings are particularly vulnerable to corrosion from saltwater and salt air.

“For many who live in Surfside, the disaster has fueled anxiety about the challenges of maintaining local residential buildings. A string of mid-rise and high-rise condos — some decades old, others brand new — loom over the Atlantic shoreline sitting on a plateau of limestone, a porous rock that allows rising seawater to seep up from below.

“In the coming decades, scientists say, buildings across coastal metropolitan Miami and the entire U.S. will be subjected to deepening challenges as sea levels rise and structures become increasingly exposed to saltwater… ‘There’s all kinds of additional risks that we’re heading into,’ said Harold R. Wanless, the director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and an expert on sea level rise.

“The sea has risen about 6 inches in the Miami area since the 1980s and is probably not responsible for the collapse of the Champlain tower, although further investigation is needed, Wanless said. But a rapidly accelerating ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica could submerge parts of Miami and other coastal areas with an additional 2 to 3 feet of sea level rise in the next 30 years.

“Although it is possible to design buildings that hold up in seawater, Wanless said, it’s more costly… ‘If you want to look to the future on a barrier island like Miami Beach, with a 2- or 3-foot sea level rise, you’re going to have hundreds of feet of coastal erosion,’ he said. ‘These buildings that are sitting behind the beach right now are going to be sitting out in the ocean, and there’s not much we’re going to be able to do about it.’

“Up and down Surfside, residents who live in oceanfront apartments are asking themselves whether they are safe. Some cannot sleep or are taking stairs instead of the elevator. Others are questioning whether they should renew their leases. Many are looking anew at their surroundings, questioning pools of water in their parking garages or slight cracks in concrete, and wondering about the fragility of life…

“More than 85,000 Miami-Dade County residents live 3 feet below sea level… For years, the area has been afflicted by ‘king tides,’ a higher-than-normal tide caused by specific alignments of the sun and moon. Even on sunny days, Miami residents have become used to saltwater seeping up onto roads and sidewalks, pooling in car garages, clogging storm drains and killing lawns and trees.

“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has proposed building a 20-foot sea wall across Biscayne Bay to hold off the rising sea, but even a wall will not protect homes and streets from water rising up through porous limestone.

“Zhong-Ren Peng, professor and director of University of Florida’s International Center for Adaptation Planning and Design, said that it was too early to know the exact cause of the collapse, but saltwater intrusion could corrode concrete and rebar and cause catastrophic failure of a building’s support.” Adapt to seawater? All you have to do is trade your parking space for a boat slip. That the GOP is fighting those aspects of the Biden-proposed infrastructure bill that deal with climate change seems so profoundly out of touch. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seems to be on the wrong side of what’s best for his own state. But then, he is a Republican.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as the weatherman said of mother earth, “Pay me now or pay me a whole lot later, but you will pay!”