First Condo Down? It Won’t Be the Last.

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It is quite likely that America has lost its first high-rise building to climate change and the resulting sea level rise. The collapse of South Champlain Towers in Miami Beach early Thursday morning is unprecedented in American history. Buildings under construction, or damaged by explosions or impacts, have collapsed, but never an untouched building on a quiet, cloudless night. When it Comes to Fire Protection, There Should Be Passive Protection As Well, that should be ensured by all the constructors before and after completing the given project.

The other thing that we have never seen in American history is the kind of assault now ongoing on Florida real estate by rising seas. The region is plagued by what the locals call “sunny day flooding,” incursions of flood water not from rain but from rising seas. Salt water is infiltrating the freshwater aquifers and poisoning coastal farm and garden fields.

The Champlain Towers building was constructed on reclaimed wetlands — in other words, sand. What bedrock there is in the area, far below the buildings located there, is limestone, which is highly soluble, subject to sinkholes, and sponge like in its ability to absorb and transmit sea water. The solubility of the limestone and the massive withdrawals of fresh water from the underwater aquifers for the intensely developed area contribute to the sinking of much of the area, which of course makes the sea level incursions worse.    

It was accidentally discovered in the 1990s that the Champlain Towers building, then ten years old, was sinking a couple of millimeters a year. No one seems to have thought that that was particularly significant. Yet it seems obvious that a high rise building of that size is not going to sink at the same rate over its entire footprint, and if it doesn’t it’s hard to imagine the stresses created on its structure.

If that turns out to be the cause of the collapse — again, the first of its kind in the entire history of the country — then it is without doubt that sea level rise, compounding the problems of instability, will soon claim many more such buildings.

The Chambers of Commerce and the Associations of Realtors will spare no effort to avoid acknowledging any involvement of climate change in this disaster. They are already having to deal with titanic changes (the pun is deliberate) in the Florida real estate markets as an increasingly weary and knowledgeable local population is abandoning seaside properties and moving inland or out of state. Inland Florida was once the province of the poorest property owners in the state, but they are increasingly being muscled aside for wealthy refugees from rising water.

(My favorite recent story in this vein is of the man who came to his senses about living on the beach, sold his very expensive property there and moved to a condo inland. The very next hurricane deposited a large yacht against his condo building. Now he wants to move to Canada. “Do you have any idea,” he says, “how hard it is to sell a condo with a yacht leaning up against it?”)

We haven’t discussed  hurricanes, and what happens when there is a direct hit on a building or buildings whose underpinnings have been destabilized by sea level rise. Stand by for a demonstration. 

The Powers that Be in Florida will do whatever they have to to avoid labelling this collapse the result of climate change. To do so would be to precipitate an immediate  collapse in real estate values — one that, in any case, is inevitable before much more time has passed and water has risen.