Most Miamians can never quite seem to get around to purchasing that pesky flood insurance for their house or apartment. Try as they might to put it on a to-do list, dishing out the bucks for a weather event that never seems to happen inevitably gets eclipsed by other tasks…
“Oh my god,” a woman intones, a shaky camera phone aimed at the sky. “There’s something that is releasing a whole bunch of light in the … Oh my god!” No, the footage isn’t the start of the latest insufferable “found footage” horror flick about an alien invasion. It’s just…
Right about now, thousands of especially grumpy Miamians are sitting in traffic wondering what the hell happened to the tropical storm that was supposed to get them out of work today. Erika was a dud, turning into nothing more than a wave of decent thunderstorms on Saturday and Sunday. If…
The streak is alive! After nearly a week of dire predictions about Tropical Storm Erika, it looks this morning like South Florida’s decade-long hurricane-free run is going to continue. Erika is actually no longer a tropical storm — overnight, it weakened into a depression. And this morning’s projections now call…
In these days of complex computer-graphed simulations and space-assisted data mining, hurricane prediction has steadily approached something like a real, reliable science. Usually, scientists can at least guess with some decent certainty what a hurricane is going to do in the next couple days, if not four or five days…
The projected path of Tropical Storm Erika has veered slightly north since yesterday, putting Miami out of the middle of various computer forcecasting models, but the city is still abuzz about the possibility of its first Hurricane strike in years (and knowing how quickly those forecast models can change, its…
See the image up above? That’s the result of meteorologists running Tropical Storm Erika’s data through a bunch of different computer simulation models and placing them all on a single map. You’ll notice just one of those models makes a direct hit in Miami-Dade. You’ll also notice however that Miami…
Set beside the aquamarine waters of Whale Harbor in the Keys is Theater of the Sea, one of Florida’s oldest marine mammal parks. For nearly 70 years it has attracted thousands of visitors with its diverse assortment of animals, many of whom are rescued and bear colorful names, like “Aphrodite,”…
Right now, if you happen to be in the middle of the Atlantic, say 1000 miles or so east of Puerto Rico, you should really be prepared for some serious anthropomorphized weather hell. If you’re in Miami, or anywhere on land, for that matter, there’s nothing much to worry about…
In April 2012, Miami-Dade Animal Services began using a new chemical disinfectant to clean the floor of its kennel. Within weeks, multiple male dogs at the kennel developed an alarming problem, a former employee says: their scrotums were badly irritated or burned. It happened more to large dogs, and sometimes…
When 95-year-old Lloyd Miller stepped to the mic to testify at a congressional hearing in Homestead earlier this month, the three Republicans on the panel may not have known they were about to be versed by a conservation legend. U.S. Reps Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Curbelo had called…
As Miami Beach is midway into a $300 million project to install dozens of anti-flooding pumps around the island, the jury is still out on their effectiveness at battling sea level rise and tidal flooding. But some residents say they’re sure about one thing: That the pumps are flooding Biscayne…
It’s now been a whole decade since Hurricane Wilma tore through Miami as a Cat 2, and without a single landfall since then, all has been quiet on the hurricane front. Too quiet. This summer, with a historic El Nino building and widespread Saharan dust spreading over the Atlantic, we’ve…
Richard Conlin woke up to the clatter of construction on Wednesday. He lives in Southgate Towers at 10th Street and West End. From his window nine stories up, he scanned Biscayne Bay and saw a sight he says he’s grown all too familiar with: the sheen of an oil slick…
Anyone who’s ever lived on South Beach knows the moment. Thunder booms, rain pounds down in solid sheets of water, and then it happens: The streets suddenly turn into rivers, sending cars and pedestrians bobbing in the massive buildup of precipitation. Floods are part of the contract that comes with…
One sunny afternoon in June, Denise Weinstein was walking Josie, her shaggy, white, Maltese shih tzu mix, outside Century Village, the 55-and-older South Florida retirement complex where she lives. That’s when the birds attacked. “Two birds were swanning down on me like dive-bombers!” she recalls. “They looked like helicopters.” The…
Freeing Lolita, an Orca kept for at Miami Seaquarium in the smallest tank in North America for more than four decades, is a cause of many animal right’s organizations both local and national, including PETA. And if there’s one thing PETA is particularly know for its rounding up celebrities and…
If you live in Miami you’ve almost certainly come across a big creepy, crawly roach making his way through your home. In fact, its probably happened more than we’d all like to admit. So it’s not surprise that data from the US Census Bureau confirms that Miami is one of…
Wynwood has a lot going for it – art galleries, a booming restaurant and cafe scene and yeah, that world-class street art. But there’s one thing sorely lacking in the former industrial neighborhood: green space. There’s that one lovely Royal Ponciana rooted outside Panther Coffee and a few flimsy palms…
By most expert accounts, Gov. Rick Scott’s tenure in Tallahassee has been a flat-out catastrophe for the Sunshine State’s already fragile environment. He slashed water management budgets and stacked regulatory board with developers. He battled tooth-and-nail against new clean water mandates. Even muttering the words “climate change” was banned in…
As if we didn’t already have enough cockroaches in South Florida, there’s a new beast in town. Last month, environmental scientist Marc Minno was ruffling through stacks of papers on his office floor, in Live Oak, Florida, north of Gainesville, when he spotted an interesting looking bug. He wasn’t startled,…
The latest doom and gloom climate change prediction has arrived this week — and it’s a doozy. The study, written by alarmist (but still reputable and regularly correct) climate change scientist James Hansen predicts that sea level will rise 10 feet in the next 50 years. That seems like a lot,…
