Just as rain is the sustenance for tropical fruits, flowers, and trees, it is the balm for the oppressive summer heat of an overbuilt city. Miami’s deluges cool off the asphalt streets and sun-beaten rooftops, so hot by afternoon the first drops sizzle to steam. They slow the breakneck traffic on Interstate 95. They sheet down the glass skyscrapers of Brickell Avenue to give workers in the financial district a taste of wild nature in their monolith offices. When the primordial storms move on, they leave Miami’s pastel-colored buildings and frangipani trees glowing in a divine luminescence of sunlight streaming through dark clouds.
Ever the Janus, rain’s intensity in South Florida can also leave burst sewage pipes that foul Biscayne Bay; streets turned to small rivers and parking lots to ponds; and soccer fields that resemble swamps. Like the rainmakers convinced they could blast storms from the sky or bring them on, the developers who dreamed up the cities of South Florida believed human ingenuity could keep capricious rain—too much or too little—in check. In fact, every inch of wetland or forest lost to every new inch of asphalt or concrete blocks rain’s return to the aquifers or out to sea, making for an odd mix of human-made scarcity and flooding. Every razed mangrove makes the rising seas, storm surges, and torrential rains associated with climate change that much worse. Miami is not unique in having developed in defiance of its hydrology. But unless the city can mend the mistake, it could be the first metropolis to succumb to it.
—
In the summer of 1977, when I had just turned eleven, my mom and stepdad moved us away from the storms of Florida to our new home in Southern California. It happened that California was searing in the worst drought in its history; 1977 was the driest year ever recorded to that time, with less than half a normal year’s rainfall. I don’t remember those records, or whether I minded the dramatic change in my landscape, the glistening wet palm trees of South Florida replaced with skinny counterparts stretching from the boulevards of Los Angeles like tall straws in search of a drink. My most enduring memory is of the concrete channels, ubiquitous as the freeways, and how gargantuan they seemed for the tiny trickle of water they carried. Some of the kids in our neighborhood sneaked into the culverts to slide down the steep smooth walls on cardboard boxes, forbidden but as common as surreptitiously swimming in a Florida canal, just without the water.
Historians have variously described both California and Florida as lands of sunshine, states of dreams, and empires of water—the latter built by government engineers. They are also coastal testaments to rain’s subjugation and ultimate sovereignty. It is rain’s nature to erode mountains, carve canyons, swell rivers, and carry torrents of water, mud, and all else it catches to the sea. Cupping Los Angeles in every direction but the coast are mountain ranges including the mighty San Gabriels. From the Pacific Ocean to the tallest San Gabriel peak—nicknamed Mount Baldy—elevation soars from sea level to more than 10,000 feet. As atmospheric rivers roll off the Pacific in winter and meet the mountains, the clouds unload. In the eighteenth century, the native Tongva people tried to warn the Spanish not to build in the paths of the jumpy Santa Ana, San Gabriel, and Los Angeles rivers, which raced from the mountains to the valleys before erupting from underground passes into willow-lined channels and marshes of the coastal plain. In the nineteenth, flood-weary Mexicans tried to explain the same thing to Gold Rush–era Americans.
Every generation ignored the last. Crops, then rooftops, rose in the floodplains. L.A.’s first real estate boom rode in on the railways of the Southern Pacific in the 1880s; tracks were built alongside the wild rivers. A torrent in 1914, so fierce that alluvium from coastal farmland beached a steamer in Long Beach harbor, led to flood-control laws.
Emboldened by dams, developers built out the basin. The Los Angeles Times habitually scolded the rivers when bridges washed out. Until 1938, most Angelenos were still unaware of the soaking El Niño storms that cut atypically south to make landfall on the coast. In late February and early March of that year, five solid days of rain soused the already-saturated mountainsides. The dams were overwhelmed. Canyon washes burst their banks. Floodwaters rushed down creeks, washed out bridges, and surged into towns throughout Southern California. When the rains stopped, the mountains continued to disgorge. The rivers rose still higher. Nearly one hundred died across the region, including five members of a family in North Hollywood and three children from one Orange County family. In L.A. alone, more than 1,500 homes were lost and 3,700 residents sheltered by relief agencies. Southern Californians vowed to dry out and rebuild—and to do so right where they were, this time with a big assist of federal dollars. Until then, flood control had included capturing rainwater to supply local towns and farms. Now, imported water from the Sierra to the north and the Colorado River convinced the region to divert all its rain to sea and rely on someone else’s. Over the next three decades, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built more than one hundred stadium-sized mountain debris basins, five mammoth valley flood-control dams, and 350 miles of concrete river channels. The Los Angeles River became a fifty-mile-long storm drain jutting ramrod across its old sinewy path. At the turn of the twentieth century, the river was still wild enough that grizzly bears lumbered down from the hills to feast on the steelhead. By the turn of the twenty-first, it was a massive concrete ditch, flowing most of the year with nothing but effluent from sewage-treatment plants upstream.
From California to Florida, the era of federal flood control—along with America’s plumbing half the continent to pipe freshwater to arid cities—profoundly changed the human relationship with rain. Building against rain instead of with it had devastating consequences for the coasts. An estimated 85 percent of Los Angeles is urbanized, 65 percent of it paved over—sealed by impervious surfaces. Every subdivision and shopping mall, parking lot and pancake house prevents rain from soaking back into the ground. The rain that used to find its natural course to the aquifer or sea is now channeled, given a new name—“stormwater”—and poisoned as it rushes over dirty streets and down gutters.
In California and nationwide, this stormwater runoff has become the single largest source of pollution fouling beaches, major bays, and rivers. Like a cat that keeps dragging a dead mole back to the bedside, rain carries back to us the pollution and wastes we thought were out of sight. Running over all that asphalt and concrete, rain picks up toxic metals, oil and grease, pesticides and herbicides, feces, and every other impurity that can make its way to a gutter. Flood-control contrivances rush the stormwater off the streets and car parks, into the concrete channels, and back to the Pacific Ocean.
California health officials are challenged with how to warn non-English-speaking families to avoid eating any toxic fish that they catch. Elaborate charts warn that children should not eat sand bass, kingfish, barracuda, or croaker from the Palos Verdes Peninsula. After a rain, Southern California’s surfers know to stay out of the water—no matter how good the waves may be. Those who defy the wisdom can end up with pinkeye, fever, or diarrhea. “The water will have this weird, funky smell to it,” observes Sean Stanley, a twenty-six-year-old who has surfed L.A. County’s beaches since childhood. “It’s murky. You’ll see soda cans and plastic bottles, oil from the cars. All the runoff from the city gets in there.”
—
The story is familiar on the east and west sides of Florida’s peninsular point. At the mouth of the St. Lucie River on the Atlantic side, and the Caloosahatchee at the Gulf, health officials routinely post advisories: “High bacteria levels. Avoid contact with the water. Increased risk of illness at this time.” Before its farms and cities, southern Florida was dominated by the Everglades, a shallow mosaic of freshwater and sawgrass that flowed south 130 miles to the sea. The late writer and Everglades champion Marjory Stoneman Douglas often referred to the great marsh as South Florida’s “rain machine.” The Everglades absorbed the deluges, filled up the chain of lakes at the north end of the glades, topped off the groundwater in the aquifer, and sent a vast sheet flow southward, retur
ning rain to the mangrove-lined estuaries of its birth.
To develop Miami and the dozen other major cities that hug the Atlantic Ocean in southeast Florida, boosters and government engineers drained, ditched, and diverted the great rain machine. They built legions of canals to irrigate farms in dry season and push the devastating, ruining, havoc-wreaking rains out to sea in wet times. Following the Mississippi River flood of 1927 and the 1928 hurricane that crashed Lake Okeechobee’s earthen dike, drowning 2,500 farm workers south of the lake, the Army Corps began to build a massive levee around Lake O.’s south rim. After the 1947 wet season dumped 108 inches of rain in South Florida—more than double what falls in a normal year—Congress authorized the Central and Southern Florida project to harness every future drop and put an end to the cycle of too much or not enough. As with the Los Angeles River, the army engineers straightened the meandering, hundred-mile Kissimmee River, the Everglades headwater, into a fifty-six-mile “Dirty Ditch,” as it became known for draining polluted runoff to Lake O. They built towering gates on the east and west sides of Lake O. to push water through canals to the Atlantic and Gulf when too much rain topped off the lake. The 1,000 miles of canals, 720 miles of levees, sixteen pump stations, two hundred gates, and other instruments of order were meant to calibrate the rain machine to human time and space. Instead, they sent it out of whack, turning the natural hydrological cycle into an artificial, hydro-illogical quagmire.
Draining and paving over South Florida brought a well-established record of devastation to water and wildlife. Now, despite multibillion-dollar restoration efforts, the engineers’ order is turning against the human population, too.
Most of South Florida’s 7.5 million residents live atop the broken rain machine; less than half the original Everglades remains. Without its sponge, the region is prone to severe flooding that can overflow canals and stall cars in swamped streets. But the most profound illogic is that South Florida regularly contends with drought emergencies even while surrounded by freshwater—trapped as it is in berms, canals, crop furrows, culverts, dams, dikes, ditches, pipes, plants, reservoirs, runnels, sluices, storm ponds, tanks, weirs, and wells. The fast-growing cities in the region overtapped the aquifer and now scramble to build costly drinking-water plants even as the Everglades plumbing flushes 1.7 billion gallons of rainwater to sea every single day.
On the flood side, when too much rain swells Lake Okeechobee, water managers must release billions more gallons to avoid a catastrophic breach of its dike. In the lake, the stormwater simmers into a toxic brew with agricultural and urban wastes including sewage, manure, and fertilizers. Dumped into the St. Lucie River on the east side and the Caloosahatchee on the west, the polluted water travels in black plumes down the rivers and out to estuaries at the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, where it can kill fish, spur toxic red tides, and shut down beaches.
In metropolitan Miami, the most immediate conundrum is how a finite and fragile tip of land can handle the sewage waste of 5 million people and nearly three times that many tourists. When I visited the Miami Dade Water and Sewer Department during rainy season, Virginia Walsh, a PhD hydrogeologist working on rainfall and climate models, explained how 300 million gallons of human waste flowing through the pipes on a normal day doubles on a day of hard rains, when stormwater overflows its drains and washes into the sewers. Miami is the world’s metropolitan ground zero for sea-level rise—now contributing to flooding in Miami Beach even on sunny days. Walsh’s computer models can tell city leaders where to shore up with bigger pipes, new pump stations, and gates that block backflow, all in the works. Scientists say Miami could face a rise of up to two feet by 2060—less than fifty years from now. The water may not wash over flood gates as we imagine, but seep up through the porous limestone and the storm drains, also elevating the consequences of Miami’s exquisite rains.
For Walsh, sea-level rise is an engineering and urban-planning problem Miami will overcome, like the Netherlands and other low-lying urban areas of the world. What keeps her awake at night is not the rise that scientists are watching, but the potential for freakish rain events that they cannot predict. Throughout its history, Miami has seen years of extraordinary rain and years of drought; climate scientists say those extremes will worsen as the planet warms. “Sea-level rise we can deal with—until or unless we get to a point when we won’t be living here anyway,” Walsh told me. “What is going to have more immediate impact on people’s daily lives is the rain.”
—
If one place in America has lived through the worst consequences of its urban rain mistakes and begun in earnest to undo them, it is the erstwhile misnamed City of Rain, Seattle. A jolting human tragedy, along with the near-ruin of Seattle’s flashing silver amulet—the salmon that swim through culture as much as nature in the Pacific Northwest—helped the larger community embrace what began as a grassroots effort to mend the city’s relationship with its iconic rain.
When I visited in winter, a leaden monotony hung over the central business district, bringing dispirit to downtown. Contrary to reputation, Seattle’s urban pallor is not born of rain, which falls almost imperceptibly from silvery clouds that match the nearby waters of Puget Sound. More than cinereal landscape, the gloom rises from the cement hardscape. The busy streets are paved dark gray, the wide sidewalks beside them light gray. The skyscrapers rise in shades of gray. The hulking freeways, ramps, and overpasses: gray. The monorail track and its elephantine pillars: gray.
Trudge the ashen sidewalks northwest to Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, hang a left on Vine Street toward the sound, and a ten-foot-tall, bright blue rain tank pops out in the dullness, tipped in whimsy toward a red brick building. Atop the tank, green pipes in the shape of fingers and a thumb reach out, the stretched index finger connected to a downspout from the building’s rooftop. Rainwater flows from roof to finger to tank. From the thumb, the rain pours into a series of descending basins built between the sidewalk and the street. The basins, in turn, cascade to landscaped wedges growing thick with woodland plants. For two blocks as Vine Street slopes to the sound, the rainwater trickles down a runnel and through street-side planters, shining stones, and stepped terraces, enlivening the roadway with greenery, public sculpture, and the sounds of falling water.
The project, called Growing Vine Street, began as a small effort among residents and property owners to turn their stretch of a former industrial neighborhood into an urban watershed. Twenty years later, such street-greening projects have become a key part of the city’s strategy for managing stormwater, the major pollutant fouling Puget Sound. This rain runoff impairs virtually every urban creek, stream, and river in Washington; makes Pacific killer whales some of the most PCB-contaminated mammals on the planet; is driving two species of salmon extinct; and kills a high percentage of healthy coho salmon within hours of their swimming into Seattle’s creeks, before they’ve had a chance to spawn.
Pollution is only one side of stormwater’s twin troubles. Flooding is the other. In December 2006, extraordinarily hard rains fell on parts of Seattle in what became known as the Hanukkah Eve windstorm. Flooding and mudslides closed major roads. Cars floated on Mercer Street under the Aurora Avenue overpass. Thousands of people driving to a Seahawks game were stranded in their cars for hours. Sewage surged up and out of toilets and drains. But the greatest tragedy occurred in a windowless basement in the Madison Valley neighborhood. A well-known voice actress named Kate Fleming ran her audioproduction company from her home at a Mercer Street crossroads where the sewage pipes were not large enough to handle the runoff from this big a storm. As the water rose in Fleming’s neighborhood, then began to fill her basement, she ran down to try to save her recording equipment. A surge of floodwater followed, and trapped her inside. By the time firefighters cut a hole through the floor above her and pulled her out, it was too late. Fleming died at a nearby hospital, at age forty-one.
In Seattle and all the cement-suffocated cities of the world, restoring hydrology
can reduce harm. Seattle is at the forefront of a rain revolution that gives floodwaters more natural places to drain, replaces impervious surfaces with porous ones, and clears rain’s pathways to aquifer and sea. Like many revolutions, this one began in the streets—actually along the edges, as engineers and landscape architects replaced concrete curbs and drains with grassy swales, and planted hundreds of trees and shrubs to help filter and slow the flow of stormwater. The first green street they finished, in 2001, eliminated nearly all runoff.
Rain gardens are another of the strategies that prove as effective as they are beautiful. Washington State University scientists found that street-side gardens clean up 90 percent or more of the pollutants flowing through on their way to Puget Sound. Green roofs likewise absorb and clean up rain. The thousands of square miles of asphalt, black tar, and gravel that cook on urban rooftops aggravate flooding and stormwater pollution as they sheet dirty rain onto cities. Green roofs—like the inspired native prairie grasses and wildflowers that bloom yellow, white, and purple atop Chicago City Hall—can cut runoff by more than half. Cisterns like the blue one on Seattle’s Vine Street capture the rain and store it for irrigation. Made by the public artist Buster Simpson, Beckoning Cistern and its reaching hand suggest Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. The idea is a new ethic for the way we live with water and rain. All the attention has helped people and businesses use less as they pollute less; total water use has plummeted since the mid-1970s even while population has soared.
Bigger picture, Seattle has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring flood-prone blocks and transforming them into lush green spaces that hold stormwater during hard rains. Along a path at the new Madison Valley Stormwater Project, an eight-foot-tall stone sculpture is dedicated to Kate Fleming, bearing the words she always recited to herself before appearing on stage: “Be a light. Be a flame. Be a beacon.”
Rain Page 24