Southern Florida, Broward County, flooding
Credit: nbcmiami
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport is a strange-looking beast. Its south runway, unveiled last September as part of a $2-billion expansion project, rests like an overpass atop six lanes of highway traffic. Across the road, facing the vast turquoise sweep of the Atlantic Ocean, is Port Everglades – home to some of the largest cruise ships on Earth. Between them, the bustling terminals handle a significant portion of the human cargo that fuels Florida’s $70-billion-a-year tourism machine.
Easily lost in all this bigness is a temporary water feature – a large puddle by the side of the road near the foot of the elevated runway.
“This is just from rain,” says Lee Gottlieb, an environmental activist and 40-year resident of South Florida. “I don’t think it’s rained here in five, six days.”
But the rainwater pools anyway. Virtually all of South Florida is only a few feet above sea level. “They elevated the runway,” Mr. Gottlieb says, “but all the terminals …” […]
This story reminds me of a dispute between a city (I think it was Briny Breezes or something like that) who wanted to keep a beach for the public use and a developer who wanted to build a big high-rise condo type building. They fought for the land in court for about 5 years. After that time period, the beach was gone; overtaken and washed away by the sea. This dispute was settled once and for all by nature, and everyone lost the battle. The water most of south Florida drinks comes from the lake in the middle of the state (which I forgot how to spell, sorry). That lake had gotten so polluted by farm runoff that it was getting almost impossible to make potable; having added Chlorine to it’s maximum safe level so they then decided they had to use Ammonia to somehow clean it up (as told to me by a friend who worked at the water filtering site). That was it for me, as everyone knows Chlorine and Ammonia together form Sulfuric Acid. I moved out of the state the same year I found that out, and would never go back.