♪♪♪

-In order to understand whether hurricanes are getting worse,

we have to understand what they've done in the past.

-Joanne Muller is a paleotempestologist.

She's a scientist who studies the forensic record

of ancient storms. [ Thunder rumbles ]

-We're looking for evidence of past hurricane events

to try to understand what the hurricane history

is on the west coast of Florida.

♪♪♪

-Every major hurricane to ever hit Florida's coast

has left behind a calling card like the sediment

buried deep beneath this lagoon.

By sifting through the evidence of long-ago hurricanes,

Muller will help Miami predict storms of the future.

[ Thunder rumbles ]

The world's great cities face threats they have never

before encountered --

New York,

Tokyo,

London,

Miami.

The threats come from the sea,

from above

and from below.

These are the problems and their solutions...

♪♪♪

...for when the water comes.

[ Waves crashing ]

♪♪♪

-At their Florida Gulf Coast University lab,

Joanne Muller's team analyzes sediment cores

to create a timeline of hurricanes

that happened centuries ago.

-This is essentially the overwash

that the hurricane has produced, so this is what the hurricane

has brought back into the lagoon.

-Muller is looking at samples from 1,000 years ago.

From 950 to 1250 A.D., the Medieval Warm Period

was a time when the Atlantic Ocean was warmer than usual.

She finds that there's more sediment overwash

and evidence of more hurricane activity in that period.

-Well, what we're seeing here in southwest Florida

is time periods of activity and inactivity,

and these time periods of activity

are correlated with warmer sea-surface temperatures

in the main development region of the Atlantic,

so, for example, during the Medieval Warm Period

when sea-surface temperatures were warmer,

we see quite a few more overwashed layers

during that time period whereas, during the Little Ice Age,

which was a relatively cooler period,

sea-surface temperatures were relatively lower out

in the main development region.

We don't see any overwashed layers.

-With Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures now rising,

Muller's research indicates that Florida should expect

more hurricanes in the 21st century.

-So what this is telling us is that,

when sea-surface temperatures are warmer,

we tend to see more landfalling storms

here in southwest Florida,

and we should be expecting more storms like this.

[ Thunder rumbles ]

-From Miamians, the upside of living by the water

has always outweighed the drawbacks,

but while most residents are used to the flooding

and heavy rains that comes with tropical storms,

they're now facing a new kind of flooding,

which comes from below the ground,

often when there's not a cloud in the sky.

It happens during what's called king tides.

Locals just call it sunny-day flooding.

-The first time that, that happened,

I was surprised because what you find, it's --

At the end of this road in particular,

you'll find a bunch of water and big puddles.

-Laura Pantano is a real-estate agent.

She lives in Shorecrest, a neighborhood in Miami

on the shore of Biscayne Bay.

-I really was ignorant about the king tide,

and I knew that the tide is controlled or influenced

by the moon and the full moon,

but I never realized how you could wake up

in the morning like this

and find water at the doorstep of your house

for no other reason than the tide,

and then I will find in my driveway all of the debris...

Like that, what you see here, that I have to clean up.

...because everything is literally on your house,

and it's sunny, and you don't understand.

-King tides are the higher-than-normal tides,

which usually occur during a full or new moon.

Because of rising sea level, high tides now often push up

through Miami's drainage system and onto the streets,

carrying debris along as they go.

The water might then disappear between tides

only to flood back up again 12 hours later.

-As the sea is rising, those same tides,

they're riding on higher seas,

so the water comes through those drains and pipes

and pops up in the streets.

There are some figures that say that a sea-level

rise in that area of Miami

is six times faster than the global average.

By 2030, it's expected that they will see

about 50 tidal floods a year

and, by 2045, about 250 times a year.

Yeah. Can you imagine?

-It's not seawater flooding.

It's freshwater in the aquifer stored beneath the city,

which is being pushed up by the rising tide.

-Cities like Miami are a complicated machine.

They try to keep saltwater from the ocean

from coming into the well zones,

and they recharge the groundwater from rivers

and canals.

We need the groundwater to be high,

sufficient for using it for water resources,

but not too high.

We need the rain but not too much rain,

so it's difficult to balance how they're going to maintain

a thick enough lens of freshwater

in the water table for water use

and not let the sea level push it up out of the ground.

-In Miami Beach, king-tide flooding

has increased 400 percent in the past 10 years.

The underlying reason why Miami experiences increased

flooding has to do not only with global sea-level rise

but with the city's unique foundation.

Doug Marcy has been studying sea level

for more than 20 years.

-This is a fossiliferous limestone.

It has calcium carbonate and quartz sand.

Most of southeast Florida and Miami-Dade area

is built on top of this type of limestone.

It's hard, so it's good for building

into for high-rise structures and things like that.

It's very porous as you can tell

and has a lot of these holes that are basically --

got little mini caves, if you will.

So to show you how porous this rock really is,

if I pour this seawater into the top...

...it goes right through kind of like Swiss cheese.

So groundwater doesn't flow that fast,

but the main point is,

there's no impedance to the flow here.

-Most of Miami and southern Florida

sit on this giant bed of limestone.

As the ocean levels rise,

seawater pushes up through the porous rock,

and as it continues to be forced up through the limestone,

it will infiltrate the natural freshwater aquifer.

-It actually can come up through storm drains

and close roads and cause transportation-access problems,

also can cause problems with businesses and whatnot,

so as the saltwater wedge moves in

and drinking-water wells come in contact with that,

then it'll start to become higher salinity values,

and they won't be able to use that for drinking water anymore.

-But it's not just salt contaminating Miami's

drinking water.

There's an even worse problem.

20 percent of Miami-Dade still uses septic tanks

to collect sewage,

and as the water seeps up to the surface,

it gets into those tanks,

causing the flood water to mix with the sewage inside.

-It's definitely not clear, fresh water.

It's muddy.

It's for sure contaminated, and it travels to your house,

to where your children walk barefoot.

-The City of Miami advises residents

not to come in contact with the flood water

and to wash immediately if they do.

James Murley is chief resilience officer for Miami-Dade County.

By air, he can see the problems that surround the Miami area,

problems that were right there from the beginning.

-When man intervenes in nature, you end up

with a lot of unintended consequences,

and we try to learn from the mistakes we made in the past.

-One of those mistakes

was the removal of the mangrove forests,

nature's protection for coastlines.

This is what Miami looked like before it was developed.

-All along here, everything you see green is mangrove.

Mangroves are very valuable.

They protect.

They break down the storm surge coming in.

It's must cheaper to maintain mangrove forest

than it is to build concrete.

You build concrete walls or dikes.

-The mangroves area Miami's prehistory,

which needs to be restored.

It's the city's human impact

that is destined to be destroyed.

-What we see coming up is a mobile-home park.

They were built decades ago in a time

when people thought we would keep the water out,

but now we know we can't do that.

-The most vulnerable areas are also Miami's most valuable.

Even at a glance, it's clear they will be underwater

when the ocean rises.

-This is in the city of Coral Gables.

It's their most expensive real estate.

We understand the value of this real estate

in terms of real-estate taxes,

but we also realize that those decisions we made decades ago

to allow this kind of development right on the coast,

we're not going to keep doing that.

If we were to experience a huge catastrophic storm,

then we'd have to relook at how we redevelop.

It may be better in the future

to relocate those most vulnerable areas.

-Dr. Keren Bolter is a climate scientist

who was born and raised in Miami.

She was alarmed to see how climate change

was transforming her city while being ignored by many.

-When I learned about climate change,

it blew my mind that all of these

dramatic changes were happening,

and people still were wondering whether it was a problem,

and once I had kids, I realized it was my life mission

to get people to wake up and understand what's happening.

-Bolter has modeled how sea-level rise

will affect Miami-Dade County through the next century

based on predictions from NOAA,

the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

-So these tools and this data

is a really good communication method to show what's happening.

We already see 20 days a year that just high tide,

the water is higher than the land,

and how does that increase in the future?

Two to three feet of sea-level rise basically takes

Downtown Miami, Miami Beach and puts it below sea level,

and these areas are where the movie stars live

and the famous people.

These are the low-lying areas,

but they stand out not only because of that

but because they have the resources.

This is very high property value,

the highest in all of Florida,

but if you look further north, we have these vulnerable areas.

What I did was, I actually modeled low-income populations

at low elevation, and what I found was,

there's a huge hot spot in this area.

-The hot spot is only 15 miles from Miami Beach.

Much of the population here lives below the poverty line.

-So there's a huge social vulnerability

and physical vulnerability in this kind of hot spot.

These are the people that will be truly displaced.

-My name is Eric Bason, and I'm a community activist

working around issues on climate change and sea-level rise.

-Eric Bason is among

those living in Miami's most vulnerable area.

-Well, the community is low-income communities,

and members such as myself are highly effected

because we don't have the resources when, like,

a flood happens.

I try to educate community members

about what's accessible to them.

When they're having meetings at city hall,

should make sure that they go and have their voices heard

so that more resources could come down

to help low-income communities like mine.

-What's going on? -Somebody is paying

for the roads to be fixed,

so somebody is paying for flood prevention.

-See you, man. -All right.

-People who live here want to make sure

they get their fair share of that money.

-There's a lot of money being given

for low-income communities to offset their flooding,

but it doesn't seem to go down to these communities.

When you vote for these people, you hire them,

and it's our responsibility to hold them accountable

and especially for poor people

if they plan on getting any help.

The squeaky wheel gets the oil.

It's just that simple.

-As Miami's chief resilience officer,

Jane Gilbert recognizes that low-income communities

are much more vulnerable to the rising sea.

-Just under 30 percent of the City of Miami population

is living at poverty level or less,

and I would say a little over 60 percent

have a hard time meeting basic needs,

whether it's rent or child care or transportation,

because we have very high costs

of both housing and transportation costs.

The majority of our population is having a hard time

making ends meet, so that needs to be built

into our resilience strategy as part of it.

-For all its citizens, Miami needs a plan to survive.

According to current projections,

sea-level rise will impact

Miami more than any other city in the US.

Miami could experience as much as a 3-foot rise by 2080

and as much as a 6-foot rise by 2100.

-This is an extremely frightening scenario.

It's scary to even think that, as a worst-case scenario,

it's possible, and the fact that it's possible,

we need to consider it.

And even more alarming, further south,

we happen to have right along the coastline

a nuclear power plant, Turkey Point.

All of the cooling canals in the surrounding areas

are extremely low, so there's a really big vulnerability

for the nuclear power plant.

It's a little scary for me living so close

to a nuclear power plant that is that low-lying.

-Miami-Dade Chief Resilience Officer James Murley

is also worried about Turkey Point.

-So the plant was built there in 1976,

and it's cooled by a large area of cooling canals.

Those probably wouldn't be the way

we would permit it today,

but, you know, that's what we had to live with.

We'd like to have cooling towers.

That may be in the future, but that's where we are.

-Miami is also considered the most at-risk

city worldwide for potential property damage

due to rising sea level and storm-related flooding.

More than $416 billion in real estate is at risk here.

-If you look at Downtown Miami right now,

you see crane after crane after crane,

and you see new construction after new construction,

gleaming towers rising out of the bay.

You think to yourself, "Wait a second.

Who's buying this? Who's selling?

Aren't these people crazy?

How can they be plunking this amount of money into it?"

We're going to get probably 2 feet of sea-level

rise by 2060, and by 2100, we might get 6 feet of water,

and none of this construction is, by law,

required to take into account

that sea-level rise within its design.

-So we have to look at infrastructure.

We have to look at building and land-use codes,

and we have to do a lot around citizen-resident outreach,

education, information.

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

-If Miami Beach is underwater within the next century,

these buildings are doomed.

-How much is the real estate in Miami Beach

worth when the beach is gone?

So I think that Miami Beach goes eventually.

If you look at the incomes of people in Miami,

Miami Beach, North Miami,

the high-income zone is still along the saltwater shore zone.

-It's only a matter of time before these houses,

along with their mortgages, end up underwater.

-But when your bathroom doesn't work anymore,

can your house retain its value?

Somebody has to give them the economic signal

that those properties are losing value.

Until they feel it, like, the bank says to them,

"You know what? Your house isn't worth the mortgage

that you have for it,"

so we'll see what happens to a lot of people

as this slower-moving trend starts to become a real issue

in the very thin crust of infrastructure in Miami.

-Today, developers continue to build

on Miami's most vulnerable ground,

and buyers keep demanding those condos with a view,

but developers are focused on the immediate future,

not beyond.

There's no long-range plan other than build, sell, repeat.

-So are these pieces of real estate

the equivalent of junk bonds?

Are these investments that people are never

going to see a return on?

At some point, the Miami real-estate market

is going to really have to start integrating accurately

the price of rising sea levels into how much stuff costs.

-That may already be happening.

A recent study found that houses on the coast

now sell for seven percent less than houses in the interior,

but what isn't changing is the high demand for property here.

-So who's buying in Miami?

Well, the honest answer is that, sometimes, we really don't know.

Miami has two property markets.

One is the market for people like you and me

who are looking for a place to live,

and the other is the market for the world's one percent.

They're looking for a place to plunk their money.

Something like two-thirds of the properties in the city

are actually owned by limited-liability corporations

whose providence is opaque.

We don't know who owns these places.

It's a great haven for offshore funny money

from developing countries

and people trying to escape taxes in those places,

putting money in Miami.

-Miami is no stranger

to resourceful if not shady business deals.

Its very inception was a huge risk.

-If you look at Miami-Dade County today,

you've got millions of people living in what was the swamp.

This map depicts Florida at the time of 1835 to 1842.

The Everglades was massive.

It measured from Lake Okeechobee down to Florida Bay,

about 4 million acres of swampland.

There were mosquitoes everywhere, so again,

there's just really nobody here.

There's really -- Other than the coastal area,

there's no place you can really live.

You can't live in the swamp.

-In 1891, an Ohio businesswoman named Julia Tuttle moved there

and began lobbying another Ohioan, Henry Flagler,

to extend his railroad to the coast.

Flagler enlisted Bohemian and other migrant workers

to build the railway,

which reached the Atlantic coast by 1896.

Then, in the early 1900s,

another entrepreneur from the north, Carl G. Fisher,

arrived and really got things going.

Fisher cut down the mangrove forests

and dredged sand from the bottom of the bay to fill the swamp.

Miami Beach was born.

Carl Fisher turned a swamp into a dream,

and almost immediately, Miami's fragile beginnings crack

with the arrival of a devastating storm.

[ Thunder rumbles ]

-The Miami hurricane of 1926,

it did tremendous destruction to the area.

The damage was unreal.

An estimated 10,000 people were homeless

and thousands of structures uninhabitable at the time.

The flooding was incredibly severe.

-Over 300 people died in that 1926 hurricane.

Adjusted for inflation,

it caused more than $100 billion worth of damage.

[ Waves crashing ]

Hurricanes hit Florida from June to November every year,

but the biggest storm of all still strikes fear

into the hearts of South Floridians,

Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

It's a night that changed the lives

of Miami's Petersen family.

-The evening before the storm hit, we were --

-I think we were at a store.

-We were out to dinner, I believe.

-Something, but... -And then...

-...we didn't take it as seriously.

-...we heard the news,

was on maybe the television that was in the restaurant,

and it said that Hurricane Andrew

has taken a severe turn to the west.

-But Hurricane Andrew suddenly changed course and intensified,

confounding the experts.

The state quickly called for an evacuation of more

than a million residents.

-The police came, and they said,

"If you're not leaving, give us next of kin, please," so --

-That kind of sealed the deal.

-But the Petersens, unable to move quickly enough,

found themselves trapped in their home

with no way to protect their young son.

-This is Bryan. He was 4.

-So get in your closets.

Put the mattresses over the opening of the closet

and protect yourself from any debris

when your windows break, and your windows will break.

-I remember my dad having to carry me on his shoulders,

the water being so high that it was up to his chest,

and me sitting on his shoulders, I could feel it on my toes,

and I'll never forget how cold the water was.

I remember the roof being gone.

I remember the entire neighborhood

looked like somebody had just flattened it

out of a pop-up book.

-And I remember my son saying,

"You can go through a hurricane and think you die."

Just -- -Yes.

-Because we put pillows on him in case any --

It was scary, still bring tears to me.

-A wall of seawater rushed in.

173-mile-per-hour winds

sent deadly debris hurtling through the air.

-The middle of the night while we were watching out the window,

we saw the green lightning,

which wasn't really green lightning.

It was the power substations exploding.

[ Explosion in distance ]

-Andrew left Miami in ruins, 25,000 houses destroyed,

more than 100,000 others damaged.

It left 15 people dead.

-The building code had been insufficient

for that type of a windstorm,

so structures were built in a way

that the roofs weren't capable, you know, flew right off.

There was plenty evidence of what we needed to do

to tighten up our building code and other standards.

-The damages were enormous, totaling $27 billion,

enough to put eight insurance companies out of business.

At the time, it was the most expensive natural disaster

to strike the United States,

only surpassed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Now, as sea levels rise, the storm surge experienced

when Andrew hit would be even more devastating.

A quarter century later,

Miami is still not fully prepared.

♪♪♪

September 7, 2017 --

Hurricane Irma barreled toward Miami.

It was the ninth named storm of the year for this area.

-We were thinking of water surge of,

I don't know, 20, 30 feet,

which means, I mean, it's a whole house.

It's gone. I was prepared for the worst.

-Facing the prospect of a category 5,

the most intense storm possible,

Miami did the only thing it could, evacuate.

♪♪♪

Irma battered the city with powerful winds.

Water poured into the streets.

Nearly the entire city went dark.

♪♪♪

In the aftermath of that storm,

Miami was forced to reckon with catastrophic damage.

-This road was completely flooded, completely.

We're talking 2 feet height of water.

-But the most shocking fact

was that Irma didn't even hit Miami directly.

It shifted course at the last second.

Now even near misses are leaving Miami underwater.

One of Florida's biggest challenges

is a hurricane phenomenon called rapid intensification.

All Atlantic hurricanes start near Africa,

and most grow or dissipate

predictably as they make the crossing,

but as they approach the Gulf of Mexico,

they encounter warmer waters.

Together, with other weather conditions, such as wind shear,

rapid intensification becomes deadly,

and as forecasters know,

it's almost impossible to predict.

-Nightmare scenario is the storm that intensifies rapidly

and catches people by surprise.

-Brian Haus does research in an attempt

to predict rapid intensification with more accuracy.

-The relatively simple explanation is but,

you know, it's the heat coming off the ocean.

The heat takes the form of the temperature,

the sensible heat, we call it, and then

the more critical component for development of a hurricane

is the latent heat, the water that is evaporated,

so I think that's probably the part that may be not as well

understood is really the evaporation at the surface.

Then it's also slowed down by the interaction

with the ocean itself, the waves on the ocean.

That's the friction that it's spinning over.

-Despite centuries of hurricane research,

predicting rapid intensification is still next to impossible.

Cracking that code may help preserve Miami's future.

-And you need to know these things as soon as possible

because you can't make these decisions at the last minute

in a place where four million other people

are making the same decision as you,

and there's two roads to get out,

so the sooner we can get good forecasts

that everybody can trust,

the sooner people can make intelligent choices

about whether they're evacuating their house,

to what level they protect their house.

-A wave generator at the Rosenstiel School of Marine

and Atmospheric Sciences allows Haus to collect data

he can't get from real hurricanes.

-What's unique about our facility here is,

we can take a decently sized chunk of water,

and we can recreate controlled hurricane conditions

over the top of that chunk of water

and really try to understand

what happens right at the interface,

and we can use that information in computer models

to predict the intensity of the storm.

A lot of these processes,

the heat transfer and the spray generation,

all that, are really happening at small scales.

We can create those conditions here,

and we can understand what's happening

right at the interface, this spray that's coming off

and how that contributes to the transfers of heat

up into the storm

and also how it contributes to the way

that the storm feels the friction of the surface.

We can generate a wind up

to a really intense category-5 hurricane,

up to 200 miles an hour.

This interface between the air and the water

where a lot of the action happens,

you see all the spray that's starting to be generated here

at these intense conditions that just explode up into the air.

-Haus has learned that sea spray

is a key component of intensification.

When wind kicks up the spray, the heat in it

is transferred to the atmosphere above.

That heat helps fuel the storm.

-There is a significant increase in the amount

of rapid intensification.

This year, it happened with almost every hurricane.

Miami has a lot to worry about in the future.

-Stronger and more frequent hurricanes,

gradual loss of the most exclusive shoreline in Florida,

sunny-day flooding through porous limestone bedrock --

These are the problems Miami faces.

To survive, Miami needs to adapt and to find new solutions

or risk being lost to the rising sea.

♪♪♪

The development along Miami's shores

is still primarily vertical towers rising out

of its Swiss-cheese-limestone foundation.

However, an increasing number of them

are designed with resilience in mind.

-So if you're talking about a dense urban downtown

where you have lots of high-rises,

you can invest in infrastructure to raise things,

build strong flood barriers and pump and piping systems

and raise roads over time to live with that water.

-With our project, Grove at Grand Bay,

we raised the terra firma,

or the ground level, 20 feet into the air.

-The Grove at Grand Bay is one of dozens

of condos being built on the water in Miami,

but it's not like any condo that came before it.

Project leader Kai Uwe-Bergmann's design

is part of Miami's ambitious new building code

for the 21st century.

-Because of sea-level rise,

the city is literally acknowledging

that that will occur and that properties

that are being developed now actually move higher.

-All-new developments along the city's coast

must be raised by almost 13 feet.

They must also be built to withstand flooding without

being crippled in the event of a 15-foot storm surge.

-The plan does stipulate

that any of the sort of mechanical rooms

are above the flood stage or, in this case, the ground floor.

-Miami's plan is just a Band-Aid

in the face of rising seas.

The city needs to look much further into the future

if it hopes to survive the inevitable.

-So we have a citizen sea-level-rise

advisory committee that is made up of engineers,

ecosystem naturalists, land-use attorney, architect, developer,

someone representing some of our low-income communities,

and they're advising us on public policies,

advising our commission on how to approach it.

-But it'll take much more than committees and consultations

to stop the water that's already at Miami's doorstep.

-You can't escape it.

Water is coming from the side, from below, from above,

and I think Miami is at that point

where they've got to decide,

"How do we solve the issues of sea-level rise?"

I do, however, think that we as humans,

if we're posed a challenge and there's a way to solve it,

we will find the energy, the resources to do it.

♪♪♪

-While coastal real estate

has always been Miami-Dade's most desirable,

some buyers now prefer higher ground

where they won't be as affected by flooding,

whether from storm surge or from rising sea level.

The term climate gentrification has been coined to describe

how some people move away from the shore

into traditionally less desirable lower-income

neighborhoods.

-Liberty City is a predominantly African-American

and Latino community.

When they originally built Miami,

the beach was supposed to be for the affluent, tourists

and things like that, so we were not allowed to be on the beach.

Because of racism and redlining,

they pushed us to the center of the city...

♪♪♪

...and now they're trying to take it away

after all these years

when they didn't want it because the place that they love so much

is going to be underwater.

We're starting to see a lot of developers come in

and buy up blocks at a time, taking over communities.

-The gentrification that's been transforming neighborhoods

across America has taken a unique twist in Miami.

-Climate-change gentrification in Miami

would be funny if it weren't so sad.

It's the sort of thing where, because of redlining and racist

housing practices historically in the United States,

you have minorities being confined

to the less desirable areas on the coastal ridge

away from the nice beaches

and the nice sea breezes and stuff,

and now that everybody is realizing,

"Like, hey, man, this whole beach thing

might not really work out while the water is rising,"

these areas have been gentrified in an amazingly rapid rate.

-My family has been in Miami for generations.

-Gunder is worried that climate-change gentrification

will force her and her neighbors from their homes

and erase a vital part of Miami's culture.

-My family has been in Overtown.

They've been in Liberty City.

They've been in Lemon City, been in Little Haiti for years.

My Miami is the west side of the causeway

where the cameras usually don't come

or people don't think about when they think about Miami.

My Miami is everyday working people,

hundreds of cultures, children playing outside.

It doesn't look like South Beach.

It's not lined with beautiful palm trees

and million-dollar hotels and a beautiful, clean beach.

Even though we're 15 minutes away from the beach,

I can name hundreds of people who've never been there,

and they've been here their entire lives.

-60 percent of Miami is living paycheck

to paycheck to paycheck,

and fully 66 percent of the city rents.

They don't own their house.

-Which leaves people like Valencia Gunder no choice

but to move to a more vulnerable area

as the money moves into her neighborhood.

-Now all of the working-class families in Miami

or most are being pushed to lower-lying areas,

so if you have a sunny-day flooding

or even a very rainy incident, it's going to take you twice

as long to get from your house to work.

That's a cost on society.

That's a burden.

-Rich or poor, officials in Miami face the challenge

of making sure everyone

is protected from Miami's rising sea.

-We are currently designing infrastructure

for the next 40 to 50 years

to 2, 2 1/2 feet of sea-level rise over that time.

We don't know what's going to happen

in the next 40 to 50 years.

Projections are going to change.

We're going to have to recalibrate our projections

every 5 years based on new scientific information.

Policy can happen.

Technology can happen, and frankly, you know,

most cities, a long-range plan is a 20-year plan.

We're doing a 40-to-50-year plan.

-Miami Beach is fighting sea-level rise on three fronts

with one of the most ambitious public-works projects

in the United States.

♪♪♪

-This is a very exciting time for an engineer

to actually see what they've designed

and actually seeing it actually come together.

[ Indistinct conversation ]

-When Bruce Mowry was the chief engineer of Miami Beach,

he had the Herculean task of keeping the most vulnerable area

in all of Miami dry.

♪♪♪

He oversaw the installation of a series of pumps

along Indian Creek Drive

following a canal just west of the beach.

It's part of a huge new pumping system.

-We have a total of about 70,

so we're going to be building about 40 more pump stations

throughout the city over the next 3 to 5 years.

This will sustain a much drier street for us

and a better quality of life

for our residents and businesses.

-The pumps are part of a $500 million initiative

to send seawater from the streets into the nearby

canals at a rate of about 5 million gallons per minute,

reducing the impact of king tides.

Miami's first challenge is to get all that water

out of the city and back into Biscayne Bay.

-And the way that it works is, after the pump station treats

the water collected from the entire drainage system,

that pump station pushes the water

through an underground system

and discharges into the bay after treating it.

-The water from the pump station gets sent

to a treatment station south of the city's core

where it gets purified with waste held in tanks.

The clean water then gets pumped back into Biscayne Bay.

-We can't retreat 1 inch.

We don't have any land available to say,

"We'll let that part go."

We need to defend at the waterfront now.

-The second front of the plan involves raising seawalls

along Miami's canals and creeks.

-This wall was constructed approximately 75 years ago,

and this was the level of which they were anticipating tides

or high waters to come in.

During high tide, water will actually come over it,

and so we're looking at a wall well over 4,

almost 5 feet higher than the existing walls

built 75 to 100 years ago.

We believe it's necessary

because of what to be expected sea-level rise,

that this is going to be our standard requirements.

This is a very direct indication of how climate change

and sea-level rise is changing the conditions in this world.

-But because of Miami's porous foundation,

even Miami's chief resilience officer, Jane Gilbert,

is skeptical that raising seawalls

is an effective long-term solution.

-Even if you have the barrier there,

the water comes up from behind

and creates its own flooding event,

so we need to learn over time to live with that water.

-Living with the reality of rising water requires

a third front in the battle, something far more radical.

-What the city has done is,

they actually went into some of those low-lying streets

and started raising them incrementally.

Now what we're raising today may not be the final elevation

50 to 100 years from now,

but it's not appropriate to try to raise

in a developed city all at one time.

-The greatest challenge in Miami Beach

is the substrate of our soil.

We live on a barrier island made out of limestone,

coral and sand.

The water is coming up as much as it's coming over any seawall,

and if we don't elevate our land

and literally have our infrastructure above the water,

it's going to come in and flood anyway.

-The best example of elevation can be found

in Miami Beach's Sunset Harbour neighborhood.

-This was the most vulnerable area

of our community at the time.

The area we're standing in now during high-tide events

would be water in the streets.

We literally see people kayaking in the streets.

It was so low, so we started here,

and this area was raised 30 inches in many spots.

-This restaurant's patio was once popular

for people-watching.

Now its tables are below street level.

-The elevation difference between where I'm standing

and what you can see

was the original elevation of the sidewalks and streets,

so when we finished these neighborhoods,

we bring soil in from the mainland.

We installed underground pipes.

We'll build our roadbed, our drainage structure

and pave the road, and it'll be 30 inches higher.

-Sunset Harbour is a 6-block neighborhood in South Beach.

Raising the streets there took 2 years and $27 million.

-That's 2 years of roads blocked,

lot of dust from road construction, noise,

just interrupting normal life routine, but the bottom line --

They suffer 2 years to rebuild a community like this

in exchange for 30 years of security.

-Many believe it's too little too late

and that a 30-year life span is too short

before the rising seas force Miami Beach

to do it all over again.

♪♪♪

-The problem is that sea-level rise is going to continue,

so raising your city is kind of like walking a plank.

It works as long as you don't get to the end of it,

and the sea-level-rise dynamic is going to continue,

so I don't think they can raise themselves out of the problem

maybe more than 3, 5 feet, and even with that,

they have to be ready for serious hurricanes

and the more extreme rainfall events project for the future,

which are raising their groundwater,

and that's a very important piece of the flooding problem.

-One of Hill's strategies for living with rising groundwater

has already been tested in the Netherlands.

-I think that we can use earthworks,

landforms to structure areas that are safe where water ponds,

and then we can float urban districts in those safe ponds.

I'm not talking about floating stuff in the Atlantic Ocean.

And the Dutch idea of canals is a great one

because it mostly relies on gravity to drain groundwater

out of high-water-table zones, but that would be a way

for us to adapt to living with more water.

-Miami-Dade Chief Resilience Officer James Murley

has looked at the Dutch model of building dikes,

canals and levies but doesn't think that it will work in Miami

due to its unique geology.

-The idea of building dikes or levies with the porous limestone

means that they're not going to be nearly as efficient

as dikes and levies in other parts of the country.

They will have an effect of lessening

an onrushing storm surge, but the water itself

is going to go right underneath through the lime rock

and is going to raise the freshwater water table,

and, you know, it's a situation that is unique to our geology,

and we have to work with that as we move forward.

-You can elevate houses. You can elevate buildings.

You can elevate roads.

People are doing it all over the country, all over the world.

They're elevating whole buildings,

but can you elevate all of the buildings of Miami Beach?

I don't know, and if you elevate it

and the limestone underneath is all full of saltwater,

you're going to have to pump water from way inland,

so there are all these things that you have to consider.

-The City of Miami Beach is committed

and planning to overcome the challenges long-term,

no matter what the cost.

-All the South Florida people are very strong-willed,

resilient people.

The people in this community, in Miami Beach,

have determined that retreat from sea-level rise

is not an option at this point.

We will rise above, and we will stay.

♪♪♪

-One building here is a shining example

of what Miami could do to face the future.

The Pérez Art Museum opened in 2013

when the reality of a sinking storm-battered Miami

became accepted by most residents.

The museum's designers faced that challenge head-on.

-Here, we're standing on the south side of PAMM,

the Pérez Art Museum Miami, right at our front doors.

To the east of me is Biscayne Bay.

We are a modern art museum.

The art starts at 22 feet above sea level

with the second level of art being at 40 feet

above sea level.

The materials that were used are unbelievably solid

to withstand major weather conditions.

Certainly the concrete throughout the entire structure,

any wood that was used on the building could sustain

both wind and water.

-While the structural materials defend

against sea level and storms,

other features work with water, ushering it into cisterns

that are used to irrigate the grounds

and then funneling any access water

quickly back out to the bay.

-As we're walking toward the east of our building,

you'll notice that the ground that we're walking on

are basically like concrete planks.

That's to allow water to flow underneath the structure

to the PAMM garage.

We're at exactly 8 feet above sea level at level zero

in the PAMM garage.

We have a gravel surface here, and the idea behind this

was to allow the water to drain as quickly as possible.

So we do have a generator,

so PAMM will never be without power,

and I think about PAMM a lot of times like a hospital

that we have art that is living and breathing

and needs 70-degree temperature,

50-percent humidity at all times and allows the art to be safe.

-The Pérez Art Museum proved its worth during Irma.

-We've learned a lot.

We've changed our procedures over the years,

but the building has sustained no damage since we've moved in.

We would never change our location.

We wear it as a badge.

-The big storm is more frightening

than the gradual rise of water.

Absolutely, and that's why we respond so intensely

to the big storm and the hurricanes.

It's a natural response.

-According to Caldas,

Miamians should be less concerned about hurricanes

and more worried about sea-level rise.

-It is more important to consider tidal flooding

than it is hurricanes.

Hurricane can come or cannot come,

but the tide comes in every day.

It's only getting worse.

The measurements are there. The data are there.

It's only going to get worse and fast.

So we have three options.

We protect.

We try to build berms and walls in different areas.

We accommodate the water.

We build areas that can flood without damage,

or we retreat, which is the, you know,

the last-resort thing that you have to do.

If your place has been flooded 250 times a year,

it's, like, it's time to leave.

We got to get out of here.

-You start thinking, "Okay. What if I don't have my car?

What if I don't have my job?" because if there's no houses

to sell, no condos to sell, that's my livelihood.

What if I don't have a home to return to?

-What we found is,

people are going to ask for the opportunity to retreat.

They weren't being told to leave.

They were saying, "We prefer to leave."

They were willing to sell their property and move.

That could change in the future,

but that's sort of where we find ourselves today,

so there's a lot of thinking going on.

There's a lot of different options being considered.

-Everybody is doom and gloom.

They're all saying, "Sea-level rise, climate change

is going to be the end of all coastal communities.

You'll never, ever be able to save the City of Miami Beach,"

and I'm saying, "No, that doesn't have to be."

We got to solve problems.

We can't just talk about how bad they are

and how much worse they're going to get.

We have to also talk about what we're going to do to correct it.

-Eric Bason says he will stand his ground, no matter what.

-I'm not planning on moving.

I plan on fighting for people in my community,

low-income communities to live the best life possible.

-I would say that I'm more hopeful than I am worried.

Maybe that's just because I'm an optimistic,

positive person,

but I do see humanity in a way that there's so much potential,

and there's so much innovation.

There are solutions that we don't even know exist,

and once we have the willpower,

the movement, we're going to find them,

and America, the world is not going to let Miami go.

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

-To order "Sinking Cities" on DVD,

visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video.

♪♪♪