Miami is a huge sitting duck for the next hurricane

​​MIAMI — Over the past half-century, South Florida has exploded from a once-sleepy waterfront retreat to one of the nation's biggest metropolises, which has nearly 6 million residents and 33 million annual tourists.

One thing that has barely changed is an antiquated flood-control system designed more than 60 years ago that leaves the region among the most vulnerable in the USA the next time a hurricane packing a high storm surge roars through.

How would the region, which continues growing and sprouting waterfront condos, stand up to a massive surge of water like those produced by Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy?

"It won't survive," Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate says bluntly.

That makes the Miami metropolitan area the second-biggest sitting duck in the country. A study by CoreLogic estimates more than $103 billion worth of property is at risk from hurricane storm surge — only New York City has more exposed property.

Miami's vulnerability is well known, but emergency planners say generations of political leaders have failed to invest the billions needed to keep flood-control systems up to date.

"This is not something that just occurred overnight," said Fugate, who dealt with nearly a dozen hurricanes as Florida's emergency management director before joining FEMA. "A lot of decisions by a lot of people over a long period of time. It's a shared responsibility. The question is: Is there the political will to start addressing that?"

Local leaders have been able to sidestep that question for decades because of the region's incredible meteorological luck. Even when Hurricane Andrew tore through in 1992 as a top-rated Category 5 storm, it moved quickly, brought low storm surge, little rain and made landfall 30 miles south of downtown Miami.

Other hurricanes have either passed over the region as small-scale storms or just grazed the area. Hurricane Gonzalo developed into a raging Category 4 this week, but it's turned toward the northeast. As this year's hurricane season draws to a close, it looks like the region will luck out yet again.

"We've never had our system tested by an event that brings high winds and storm surge," said Alex Barrios, manager of Miami-Dade County's stormwater drainage design section. "We've always had one or the other. We've never had the super hurricane."

That helps explain why little has been done to protect the region.

"We tend to react when the need becomes so compelling that there is no other way out," said Antonio Nanni, a structural engineering professor at the University of Miami who has studied large-scale flood-prevention projects in cities such as Amsterdam and Venice. "Otherwise, we postpone and procrastinate, because any solution is painful."

UNRULY ELEMENT

Controlling water in South Florida is an incredibly complicated task.

To the east is the Atlantic Ocean. Its waves not only erode the beaches of the area's barrier islands, but it is constantly pushing saltwater into the region's water supply.

To the west are the Everglades, a massive collection of swamps and marshlands that must maintain a certain level of water to survive and help push back that encroachment of saltwater. After attempts to drain it in the early 20th century, state and federal officials are spending more than $12 billion to restore the Everglades.

To the north is Lake Okeechobee, the seventh-largest freshwater lake in the country and the source for most of the water that feeds the Everglades and South Florida. If the water level in the lake gets too low, everything downstream suffers from lack of water. If it gets too high, water can spill over the lake's 6-foot dike and flood communities around it. When that happened during a hurricane in 1928, more than 2,500 died.

There's even water underground. Most of South Florida sits on a bed of porous limestone and the Biscayne Aquifer, a 4,000-square-mile reservoir that provides most of the drinking water for the area. If the water table get too high, water pushes up through storm drains and sewage systems, flooding entire communities. If it gets too low, saltwater intrudes on the drinking supply.

Then there are the canals. To keep water flowing from Lake Okeechobee through the Everglades and out to sea, the entire metropolitan region is lined with thousands of miles of canals. They are used to irrigate the expansive farms south of the lake, recharge the Everglades, provide clean water to the residential region and direct floodwaters out to sea.

"It's like putting a marble in the middle of a dinner plate and trying to balance all those competing interests," Blake Guillory, executive director of the South Florida Water Management District, said of managing all those waterways.

The district operates 70 pumps that can actively push water, but only four of those are in the residential portion of South Florida — the rest are near Lake Okeechobee and in the Everglades. That means water management officials rely mostly on gravity, and an extensive series of gates, to slowly get water out to sea.

District officials say the system can reduce flooding by about 1 inch of water per day. So if any area gets 14 inches of flooding, it will take two weeks to drain.

"Our system was designed for 2 million people," said Guillory, whose district oversees the primary waterways in a 16-county area. "Everything west … was going to be agriculture. Today, all of that pavement and rooftops, that water has to go somewhere. The canals weren't designed to handle that much water."

NO DOLLARS

Some progress has been made.

Canals have been dug deeper, and their walls have been improved. Some cities, such as Miami Beach, are upgrading their drainage systems. Others, such as Sweetwater, have worked with state and federal partners to create storage basins to hold stormwaters while the system drains the area.

Guillory says the district's budget is mostly dedicated to Everglades restoration and doesn't allow for much more than upkeep and operation of the flood-control system. Less than 10% of the district's $740 million annual budget goes to building flood-control structures. Local governments also face tight budgets. Miami-Dade County, for example, spends about $25 million a year maintaining and operating its flood-control systems and about $10 million on upgrades.

Sea walls erected in New Orleans and New York are cost-prohibitive because there are too many places to protect in South Florida. There are hundreds of miles of coastline and thousands of miles of canals criss-crossing the region. Water specialists at the water management district burst out laughing when asked about sea walls.

City officials in Fort Lauderdale, sometimes referred to as the "Venice of America" because of its abundance of canals, marinas and waterfront homes, estimated that a citywide redesign of flood-control systems would cost $1 billion.

Fugate says federal funding isn't a realistic option since Congress has focused on helping cities recover from major disasters, not prepare for them.

FEMA provided $64 million in grants in 2013 for pre-disaster mitigation efforts, but that was for the entire country. Even when Congress approved an $831 billion stimulus package in 2009, only a handful of South Florida flood-control projects received help through the Army Corps of Engineers.

"The dollars just aren't going to be there," he said.

The region's fractured governance is also to blame. In addition to state and federal entities that manage the area's water supply, there are three county governments and more than 100 municipal governments that handle their own water systems. Many of the flooding problems span multiple jurisdictions, and emergency managers say leaders have rarely worked together to address them.

Add it all up, and even residents with little understanding of water management understand what it will take for something to get done.

"They'll only fix everything after the crisis," said Joanna Davis, an author who lives on Brickell Key, a small island across from downtown Miami.

Some, such as former Florida emergency management director David Halstead, simply accept the risk.

"There's a price to living in paradise," he said.