We’re Going to Figure This Out

JESSICA BEACH
Chief Resilience Officer, St. Augustine

“The big take-home message for communities is accepting that we live near water, so we need to embrace that. We do try to fight it with infrastructure projects, but at some point, where do we draw the line? That’s where the planning, studies and future forecasting are helping us prioritize things.”

When Jessica Beach was hired by the city of St. Augustine as a stormwater engineer in 2017, the public works director gave her a pair of knee-high wading boots and some advice: “She said, ‘You need a tide app on your phone.’ She was not kidding, as I quickly found out,” Beach recalls. “I drove through the high tide this morning to get to work.”

Exceptionally high tide events, also known as king tides, aren’t a new phenomenon. In Florida, they typically occur in the autumn and winter when the sun and moon are closest to Earth and their gravitational pull on the ocean strengthens. But “as the sea level has been incrementally increasing, the frequency of these high tides increases, and wider areas are being covered (by water),” Beach says.

St. Augustine’s aging infrastructure, along with increasingly heavy rains, exacerbate the situation. The nation’s oldest continuously occupied city is equipped with historic six-inch clay pipes, which often can’t drain stormwater fast enough to prevent rainfall-driven flooding.

With the majority of the historic city located in a flood plain, the stakes are high. “If we were to do nothing, in 50 years, the city is probably going to see $4 billion in storm surge and flooding impacts,” Beach says.

But St. Augustine is doing plenty. The city has a half-dozen projects underway to try to mitigate those impacts via drainage upgrades, pump station installations, seawall construction and restoration, and shoreline enhancement.

The biggest project involves Lake Maria Sanchez, a small body of water just south of downtown that floods during king tides, heavy rainfall and severe weather, spilling into St. Augustine’s core and its surrounding neighborhoods. A $30-million flood mitigation project will protect around 200 acres of the city’s historic downtown by 2027. It includes stormwater infrastructure upgrades and installation of a stormwater pump station, tide check valves and a floodwall.

Also in the works are two citywide projects to reduce and monitor nuisance flooding and two city planning studies, including a $3-million partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to survey coastal storm impacts. At the same time, about 60 residential properties are in queue to lift flood-prone structures within the FEMA Flood Mitigation Assistance Program.

Beach, St. Augustine’s chief resilience officer since 2021, says she’s encouraged by how proactive the community is. “When you talk about the definition of resilience, I’ve seen our (residents) adapt on their own, figuring out ways to adapt their properties. They’re committed to the community. It’s a beautiful city, and we don’t want it to go anywhere. We’re going to figure this out.”

That determination was a common thread woven throughout conversations with other resiliency officials across the state. Here’s what they told us, in their own words, about their battles against sea level rise and climate change.

JAMES F. MURLEY
Former Chief Resilience Officer, Miami-Dade County

I retired Oct. 1, marking my 50th year of working on this stuff. The term resilience, as we’re now using it, is on a continuum. It’s not new. ... Comprehensive planning, growth management, ecosystem management, sustainability and now into resilience — that’s a continuum. What dropped in that we never talked about 50 years ago? Climate change. That was the great disruption. It was the one that said, ‘You cannot look at the past and think that’s going to be replicated going forward.’

We have to look seriously at the science and projections we’re getting for sea level rise, extreme heat and intense rain events. We need the best of our scientists, universities and other places to help us with compound flooding at the local level. ... It’s going to cost more. It is important to find the local, state and federal funding to help us continue to address this. It doesn’t happen overnight, but we need to have that constantly in front of the professionals who are advising the elected officials.

In a big county or city government, most of the important work on the ground is done by departments. Your resilience office, no matter how many people it has, is going to coordinate across those departments. (Murley’s office grew to 25 staffers throughout his career.) ... We always tell the mayor and our county commission, ‘We need to do this with our cities. These are not solved by jurisdiction. They’re solved by identifying joint problems.’

The state of Florida has put a lot of money into (climate adaptation), compared to what this Legislature did 30 years ago. There’s no comparison. The complaint 30 years ago was that the state would pay for planning but not for implementation. And I think that message was heard. You now have planning and implementation money in the Resilience Florida program that is administered by the (Florida Department of Environmental Protection).

Sea Level Projection

Since 1994, Miami’s Virginia Key has seen 0.31 feet of sea level rise, averaging around 0.12 inches per year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sea Level Calculator. Given an intermediate climate projection, the city could see 1.12 feet of sea level rise between 2000 and 2050.

CYNTHIA CANNON
Planning & Zoning Division Manager, Pensacola

What makes the city’s resiliency efforts so strong is that we collaborate. We have so many partners, including the University of West Florida. We have the Pensacola & Perdido Bays Estuary Program. We have the military’s efforts. ... It’s very efficient when we have such good relations like that without needing to compete for funding. Having that infrastructure of resources makes us really strong.

In the aftermath of storms and flooding, we know that divorce, bankruptcy and suicide rates can go up 30%. The numbers are pretty staggering. When you look at your social resiliency efforts, you need to keep a really critical eye. ... We tend to talk a lot about our storm drains and storm pipes, and we’ll continue to do that, but the social component of it should be year-round, 24/7, as far as I’m concerned.

The mayor just initiated a strategic plan for the city, realizing that one had never been done, to set forth the vision for the next 20 years. There was all this community outreach, and out of that, eight recommendations came back. One was to commit to a more resilient Pensacola. I thought that it was great that it came from the community, asking the city to step up. They are raising the bar for us.

Sea Level Projection 

Since 1923, Pensacola has seen 0.89 feet of sea level rise, averaging around 0.11 inches per year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sea Level Calculator. Given an intermediate climate projection, the city could see 1.12 feet of sea level rise between 2000 and 2050.

WHIT REMER
Sustainability and Resilience Officer, Tampa

“We owe it to ourselves to remind ourselves that all the great things that come with Florida also come with risks. There’s only a certain amount of engineering that we can do to mitigate or avoid those risks.” — Whit Remer, Sustainability and Resilience Officer, Tampa

My sophomore year at Florida State University, I was studying geography and political science. On Aug. 29, 2005, I watched Hurricane Katrina barrel into New Orleans. It seared images in my mind that have really led me to the work that I do today.

Our communities are hurting (because of the 2024 hurricane season), and they’re hurting for many different reasons. The storms did very different things to people even just a couple of miles or, frankly, even a couple of blocks apart. (Between hurricanes Helene and Milton, damage assessment teams reported 1,599 impacted structures and at least $832 million in public and private damage in Tampa.)

Inches matter with flooding in Florida. Therefore, elevation requirements are going to be a really important tool. It’s expensive to do that, and it’s going to change the look and the feel of communities. But that’s what climate adaptation looks like, and that’s the type of investment that we need to be making if we want to continue to call Tampa home. ... I like to call it ‘submerge and emerge.’ We need to learn to get wet for a couple of days or hours, and then to dry out and get back to real life. That’s the goal.

Key Accomplishments

• Installed around 2 megawatts of solar on city buildings, with another 2 megawatts in planning and design
• Saved $1.3 million in annual utility costs for the city through energy efficiency measures and solar, plus $438,000 expected in an IRS tax credit
• Secured $75 million from state and federal programs for resiliency projects covering stormwater, seawalls and green infrastructure
• Established the One City of Tampa AmeriCorps Green Team, the first city-sponsored environmental stewardship program for AmeriCorps in Florida

Success in Palmetto Beach

A neglected seawall used to sit in the Palmetto Beach neighborhood, just north of Port Tampa Bay. The area’s 2,000-some residents — about half of which are part of minority communities — had begged for a replacement for years to protect them from storm surge. After three unsuccessful funding attempts, Remer secured a $24.7-million federal grant and a $6.1-million city match to help fund major stormwater and mobility improvements in the neighborhood

Sea Level Projection

Since 1947, Tampa Bay’s St. Petersburg has seen 0.78 feet of sea level rise, averaging around 0.12 inches per year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sea Level Calculator. Given an intermediate climate projection, the city could see 1.18 feet of sea level rise between 2000 and 2050.

CARRIE BLACK
Chief Sustainability & Resilience Officer, Orange County

Hurricane Ian in 2022 was a historic rain event by every measure. (Areas in Orange County received up to 16 inches of rain, and the storm caused an estimated $206.32 million in property damage in the area.) That really made us focus on flooding, looking at stormwater and making sure we are prepared for extreme weather events. Or storms that are getting stronger. Hotter days that are staying hotter longer, so you don’t have any reprieve in the evening. We’re addressing that in my office.

I get the pleasure of working across the entire county’s operations, divisions and departments on different projects. For our office, our north star is our Sustainable Operations and Resilience Action Plan. This plan is focused mostly on internal operations to make sure we are leading by example with reducing our carbon footprint and being good stewards of natural resources. This plan touches on everything from energy conservation to water conservation. (The county’s 8,000 employees and operations account for about 3% of the area’s total greenhouse gas emissions.)

Right now, we are working on updating our future land use plan and its corresponding code. What is our vision for the next 25 to 30 years? We have a lot of people moving to Central Florida, which is great, so we want to make sure we are growing in a smart and sustainable way. That definitely corresponds with climate change: making sure we’re growing in a resilient manner as the changing climate brings more extreme weather events and trying to make sure our infrastructure and buildings are resilient and hardened.

Key Accomplishments

• Established 1 megawatt of floating solar at the Southern Regional Water Supply Facility, marking the largest floating solar array in the Southeast
• Established 17 goals and 111 short-term actions within a Sustainable Operations & Resilience Action Plan
• Secured $1 million in federal funding to the Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford MSA for climate action plan development
• Secured $807,430 in federal funding to use on energy audits, energy transition plans, electric vehicle plans and more

Success in Orla Vista

The Orlo Vista neighborhood and its 6,000-strong population are historically among the hardest hit in west Orange County during flood events. In a $23-million flood mitigation project, the county is making three retention ponds around 10 feet deeper, tripling their water storage capacity. The ponds are connected via pipes, and their water levels are controlled with pumps. The project was 97% complete at the time of Hurricane Milton, leaving the neighborhoods largely unaffected despite receiving around 10 inches of rain.