Sea-level rise and stronger storms are making flood control in South Florida obsolete, but officials are studying how massive water pumps and taller spillway gates could keep South Florida drier un…
If everything goes to plan, the Army Corps of Engineers and SFWMD would install 20 pumps in the matrix of canals in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. “Some gates would be raised in height, but we would also have to tie in the gates to higher lands,” said SFWMD resiliency officer Carolina Maran.
The “study” phase means the Army Corps of Engineers is asking lots of questions about what life looks like 100 years from now in South Florida, and what the flood infrastructure will need to be to protect it, said Col. James Booth of the Army Corps of Engineers during the panel discussion. “The Corps is taking into consideration what sea-level rise curves we’re going to be using, what’s actually going on with rain intensification, are we using the right models? Are we designing a system that’s ready to handle that?”
In an email, Tim Gysan, the Corps’ project manager for the study, and lead hydraulic engineer Amanda Bredesen, said that their study will assess sea-level rise across the project life cycle of 50 years, from 2035 to 2085, and will be “evaluated under low, intermediate, and high sea-level rise scenarios to determine the overall project performance.” The low scenario shows 1.2 feet of rise since 1992, intermediate shows 2 feet or rise and the high scenario predicts 4.4 feet of rise since 1992.
Maran said SFWMD is doing its own sea-level rise modeling. “When we run our studies we look at plus-one feet, plus-two feet and plus-three feet of sea-level rise.”
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