This Keys neighborhood has been flooded for more than 90 days. Is relief coming soon?
The Key Largo neighborhood of Stillwright Point has become the poster child of what to expect from global sea level rise.
Most of the streets in the subdivision of 215 upper-middle-class and luxury homes have been underwater for more than 90 days, a saga that has made news across the world.
Water levels began to ebb this month, but the diluvial ordeal has left a lasting impact on residents who worry about their future quality of life in the bayside neighborhood.
The immediate cause is seasonal king tides that typically flood the neighborhood for a few days every fall. They’ve been made worse this year by a swollen Florida Bay that is full of water from a Gulf Stream backed up by offshore hurricanes in late September, meteorologists say.
But officials including Monroe County Mayor Heather Carruthers say the situation is a harbinger of the types of flooding coastal communities worldwide can expect because of rising ocean waters due to climate change.
“What you’re dealing with now is just the very beginning of what governments around the world are going to have to deal with,” she said at a Monroe County Commission meeting Wednesday in Key Largo.
But Stillwright Point residents want immediate action from the county in the form of raising the roads, relief for which they’ve been asking for at least a decade because king tide flooding means stagnant saltwater holds them hostage in their homes.
Saltwater is lethal to a car’s steel frame, and walking through it can cause health problems. Emilie Stewart, who lives in the neighborhood, said some elderly neighbors are skipping doctor visits and wouldn’t eat if it weren’t for friends venturing out to get them food from a nearby Winn-Dixie.
“Had Monroe County not kicked the can down the road for the past several years, we wouldn’t have the crisis we’re facing now,” Stewart said Wednesday during the commission meeting.
The situation has gotten so bad that the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office isn’t sending deputies into the neighborhood on routine patrols. Adam Linhardt, spokesman for the sheriff’s office said deputies may ask residents to meet them in a drier place so their patrol cars don’t get corroded by saltwater. The sheriff’s office is going into the neighborhood for emergency calls.
“We’re not actually driving our cars in the saltwater because the sheriff has to protect the taxpayers’ fleet. But, if it is a life-or-death situation, we will get to you come hell or high water,” he said.
Residents wanting immediate action from the five-member commission didn’t get it this week. Commissioners instead unanimously voted to fast-track a study of the neighborhood that will include modeling and future sea level rise projections. The study is also expected to cover what it would take to elevate the roads and the project’s cost.
The streets of Stillwright Point are among the 314 miles of county roads expected to be a part of a complete Monroe study. Rhonda Haag, the county’s head of resilience, said elevating them all in preparation for sea level rise would cost more than $1 billion.
For Stillwright Point alone, Haag said the project’s price tag would be in the millions of dollars.
“We’re talking about a major road elevation,” she said Wednesday.
Along with raising the roads, the project would also entail a drainage system, systems to collect and mechanically treat stormwater, a system to transport the stormwater, and also widening the roads, Haag said.
The study is scheduled to be completed in April.
The cost predictions discussed Wednesday come the same month Haag said at a conference in Key West on sea level rise that elevating less than three miles of road on Sugarloaf Key in the Lower Keys to withstand sea level and future king tides could cost $75 million.
But residents who spoke at Wednesday’s County Commission meeting wondered why nothing has been done in the past in Stillwright Point. While this year’s flooding has stayed around longer than in previous years, standing water in the streets has been an issue that residents in the low-lying neighborhood have been dealing with for years.
Carl Hansen said the roads should have been elevated while the county was building its $67 million centralized wastewater project in 2015, which was mandated by the state to help clean nearshore waters. He said at the time, there were mountains of fill created from construction crews digging up the road to lay pipe that could have been used to raise the streets. Instead, the county paid trucks to haul it away.
“It actually would have saved you money,” Hansen said.
Bill Marlowe has lived in the neighborhood for about five years. The retired physicist has been measuring water levels nearly every day since the flooding began. He said the situation in Stillwright Point is the perfect opportunity for the world to study the future impacts of sea level rise to the point where he doesn’t feel modeling and projections are needed.
“Mother Nature is providing us with a look at the future. It’s empirical data,” he said. “It’s not a guess. It’s not a projection.”
This story was originally published December 12, 2019 at 4:30 AM with the headline "This Keys neighborhood has been flooded for more than 90 days. Is relief coming soon?."
