Floods in Florida: Sunshine State finds rainy days heavy with biblical irony

A convenient aspect of life in Florida for the cabal of billionaire golfers who live there is they were able to throw their clubs into the back of the private jet for the short trip up to Pinehurst, in North Carolina, for this week’s US Open. And they picked a good time to exit the Sunshine State.

Yet again, the weather gods have put on a jaw-dropping display of anger with a breathtaking flash flood that swept through Miami and created a big, splashy question mark over the future of Florida itself – even as its legislators offered a single-finger salute to the concept of climate change.

Loudness and vibrancy have always been the calling card for Florida, basking in its reputation as the US’s year-round sunshine resort throughout the 20th century. It’s where Papa Hemingway found a few blissful years, marlin fishing off Key West; where John Updike sent Rabbit Angstrom along with hordes of other prosperous, ageing Americans to enjoy their golden years. To many international visitors, Florida was America, with its Keys, the Everglades, Disney World and endless sunshine.

This year, Floridian cities reported their hottest May temperatures on record. That came just weeks after Ron DeSantis, the state governor and brief alternative to Donald Trump as Republican presidential candidate, signed a Bill that wilfully reduces the emphasis on counteracting global warming and actively removes the word “climate” in nine different sections, according to opponents of its passing. It bans offshore wind energy and leans favourably towards the fossil fuel industry – and thus caused general alarm, inspiring one local television meteorologist to have, well, a meltdown on air as he expressed his frustration.

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“We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots,” DeSantis declared on social media.

Local sea level has risen about a foot in the last 80 years, with eight inches of that total in the last 30 years. The second foot will take only 30 years, the next foot only 20 years

—  Miami Herald editorial

But the zealots are the least of his worries. Last year was Florida’s hottest since 1895 – a statistic that gives climate-sceptics cause to point and shout: see, it was just as hot in the 1800s. Coastal water temperatures rose to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius): blissful for scuba-divers until they descended in those azure waters to find Florida’s stunning coral reefs bleached and succumbing to diseases which the National Ocean Service has been warning about for a decade. Last August, Idalia, one of the US’s many summer hurricanes, hit Keaton Beach in Florida, leaving a $3 billion trail of destruction.

In 2022 Hurricane Ian caused, directly or otherwise, an estimated 140 deaths and a staggering $109 billion in damages. This year’s hurricane season has already started and is predicted to be the most active ever. None of this is good news for Florida’s homeowners, who have watched aghast as insurance fees have risen with the water levels, placing the Sunshine State first in national premium costs. Homeowners in what are considered to be weather-prone areas of the state are struggling to persuade any insurer to take their homes on at all.

This week’s flood in downtown Miami generated a bleak editorial in the Herald, which warned readers that “local sea level has risen about a foot in the last 80 years, with eight inches of that total in the last 30 years. The second foot will take only 30 years, the next foot only 20 years”.

On Wednesday, DeSantis declared a state of emergency in five counties around Miami as rivers of rainfall ran through residential streets and commuter thoroughfares: cars destroyed, lives threatened. In a moment of biblical irony, the rain arrived on the very day – June 12th – that DeSantis signed, according to the Tampa Bay Times, the state budget after cuts amounting to $1 billion (€935 million) in storm water, sewer and waste projects.

In the halcyon summer of 2016, humorist Dave Barry, a long-time Florida resident, published a book that was intended as a stout defence of his home, titled Best. State. Ever.

“On the one hand,”, he wrote, “the national consensus is that Florida is a stupid weird insane dysfunctional hellhole that is also – I forgot to mention this earlier – a hurricane zone that is soon going to be largely submerged when global climate change causes the seas to rise to the point where vast herds of lobsters roam what is now Interstate 95. On the other hand, people keep coming here. And most of them – even the non-stupid ones – decide to stay here.”

That may have been true then. But in 2022, 500,000 Florida residents decided they’d had enough, and data suggests they went seeking the less volatile weather events of the Carolinas or the Great Lake states.

Barry believes the election farce of 2000 rendered Florida the joke state of America: the swampy boot-heel full of oldsters and sunstroke-y eccentrics, easy pickings for the snootier states from up north, whose residents always secretly pined to move down there anyway.

But the laughter is drying up.