Lori Rittel packed up and left her Montana home to live in the Florida Keys. Paradise found, right? Not exactly. Rittel, 60, may have escaped long winters, but two years ago climate change knocked at her door.
That’s when Hurricane Irma, packing winds of 130 miles per hour, hit the Keys. Afterwards, large portions of the Lower Keys “looked like a war zone,” The Miami Herald reported. More than 27,000 homes suffered some degree of damage, including 1,179 that were destroyed.
Rittel cannot afford to rebuild or repair her bungalow. Her bedroom is too badly damaged for her to sleep in it, and her bathroom is missing a wall. Her best hope for escape is to sell it to the government to knock down. “I just want to sell this piece of junk and get the hell out,” she told Prashant Gopal of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “This will happen again.”
Taxpayer buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas such as New Orleans, Houston, and Staten Island, New York, are enabling some Americans to get out of harm’s way. Florida, the state with the most people and real estate at risk, is just starting to buy homes, wrecked or not, and bulldoze them to clear a path for swelling seas before whole neighborhoods get wiped off the map, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration. Even in a “managed retreat,” coordinated and funded at the federal level, the economic disruption could resemble the housing crash of 2008.
Some small communities are moving lock, stock and barrel. In 2016, Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles became the first place to be given federal money to replant itself. The residents, situated on an island being eaten away by the sea, are headed for a former sugar cane farm 30 miles inland. “We are called climate refugees but I hate that term,” said Chantal Comardelle, who grew up there.
In Alaska, a dozen coastal towns, inhabited mostly by Inupiats and other Alaska Natives, are also planning to relocate. Diminishing sea ice is exposing them to storms, and rising temperatures are thawing the very ground beneath them.
The migration from the nation’s coastal areas would be dramatic. The closest analogue could be the Great Migration, a period spanning a large chunk of the 20th century when about 6 million African Americans departed the Jim Crow South for cities in the North, Midwest and West, Oliver Milman wrote in The Guardian.
“I don’t see the slightest evidence that anyone is seriously thinking about what to do with the future climate refugee stream,” Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of coastal geology at Duke University, told Milman. “It boggles the mind to see crowds of climate refugees arriving in town and looking for work and food.”
Pilkey’s new book, written with his son Keith and titled Sea Level Rise: A Slow Tsunami on America’s Shores, envisions apocalyptic scenes where millions of people, largely from south Florida, will become “a stream of refugees moving to higher ground.”
It seems clear that the federal government will have to become more active in coordinating efforts to move Americans out of danger and to limit the financial toll on them--and on the country as a whole. “The scale of this is almost unfathomable,” Billy Fleming, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “If we take any of the climate science seriously, we’re down to the last 10 to 12 years to mobilize the full force of the government and move on managed retreat. If we don’t, it won’t matter, because much of America will be underwater or on fire.”
Philip Stoddard is the mayor of Miami Beach, which is on the front lines, and he has been a forward-looking advocate of strong action to counter climate change. One point he makes is that our nation faces some difficult choices. “We need a plan as to what will be defended because at the moment the approach is that some kid in a garage will come up with a solution,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “There isn’t going to be a mop and bucket big enough for this problem.”