Melanie Lustig walked out of her job at Monkey Jungle in mid-September. The last straw, she says, was scooping up piles of rotten fruit and feces inside an enclosure where the park’s orangutan, Mei, had been kept for days. The New Jersey native had been dismayed for months by the…
Monkey Jungle got its start in the ’30s when Joseph DuMond released a troop of monkeys into a dense patch of South Dade wilderness and then opened it as a one-of-a-kind attraction “where humans are caged and monkeys run wild.” More than seven decades later, the 30-acre roadside park — which allows some monkeys to roam freely while visitors gaze at them from an enclosed path — still makes that promise.
For more than a month, Miami-Dade County has been sending garbage trucks full of hurricane debris and trash to Poinciana Industrial Park, a county-owned lot directly in front of Northpark, a residential neighborhood filled with families, children, and senior citizens. Furious, residents have begun protesting what they call a clear case of environmental racism.
As sea levels continue to rise, Florida has taken a licking for its bad habit of climate-ignorant development. But despite warnings from the state’s most brilliant and respected scientists, Gov. Rick Scott has more or less disregarded the issue, infamously banning the Department of Environmental Protection from using the term “climate change” in 2015. And though national publications such as Scientific American have taken developers to task for their reluctance to stop building along the coast, state law does little to discourage the practice.
After getting a call from someone about trash piling up in a Miami canal, environmentalist Dave Doebler turned to Google Maps to get the GPS coordinates. What showed up on the screen shocked him: The massive clump of trash could be seen in satellite images.
Miami hasn’t just been extra hot this year — at this point, it sometimes feels as if we’re living in a totally different climate. Not only was July of this year the hottest single month in city history, Dade County has also surpassed yet another heat record already this year…
The City of Miami has the makings of a massive lawsuit on its hands. After the city’s racist, Old South government crammed a belching, eye-stinging smokestack into a segregated, black-only part of Coconut Grove in 1925, residents complained for years that the trash-burning incinerator was bad for their health and probably giving them cancer.
After reading New Times’ story about the Overtown soil contamination — and the failure to inform residents about it — Miami-Dade Commissioner Audrey Edmonson is sponsoring an ordinance that would force property owners to post a notice of environmental contamination on polluted sites.
Normally around this time of year, Esther Alfonso-Luft’s Virginia Key business would be renting hundreds of kayaks, paddleboards, and mountain bikes to adventuresome residents. The Virginia Key Outdoor Center would be hosting monthly slack-line meetups and moonlight paddling events.
For decades, Miami’s “Old Smokey” trash incinerator operated near Coconut Grove, belching smoke over George Washington Carver K-12 School, a segregated, black-only school from its inception in 1899 until the county desegregated in 1966. In 2014, New Times tracked down residents who grew up under Old Smokey’s ash plume, and quickly discovered many of them later developed respiratory problems, sinus issues, chronically itchy eyes, and even pancreatic cancer.
Thanks to sea-level rise, Florida’s unique topography, and poor city planning, areas of Miami-Dade County look like a hurricane hit them today. But there’s not even a tropical storm in town. Instead, mere weeks after a real hurricane did damage major parts of South Florida, the Miami area is massively flooding thanks to a combination of some moderate storms hitting during king tides, when the sea is at its highest point all year.
The Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station is built directly on the waterfront in Homestead — a location that has exposed the plant to serious natural disasters in the past. The reactor survived Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but the storm’s 175-mph winds did knocked out the plant’s communication lines, disable the emergency…
Here’s the good news for Miami: A tropical wave rolling this morning off Nicaragua that now has a 90 percent chance of morphing into a named storm isn’t likely to hit South Florida. Instead, the system is expected to clip the Yucatan and then head north before possibly impacting the Panhandle…
Miami hasn’t come close to picking up all the gigantic mounds of rotting palm fronds and shattered ficus branches left over from Hurricane Irma. The Florida Keys will only officially reopen to tourists this Sunday. So of course, a new tropical storm might just whip out of the northwestern Caribbean and batter South Florida and the Keys this weekend with some extra wind and rain.
The U.S. is focused this week on Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Maria has left a humanitarian crisis in its wake, with millions of American citizens still without water, food, and power. But Maria caused devastation across the Caribbean, including the tiny island of Dominica, a 290-square-mile nation 400 miles east of Puerto Rico. Within hours of the Category 5 storm striking, 90 percent of the island’s buildings were destroyed and, in less than a week, 27 people were killed.
Two weeks ago, Irma, a catastrophic Atlantic hurricane killed 38 people and destroyed thousands of homes in the Caribbean Islands before turning its sights on South Florida. Among its most victimized was Saint Thomas, a 32-square-mile island located 110 miles east of Puerto Rico. As one of 51,000 St. Thomians, Ramseyer, a 26-year-old marine biology graduate student, endured the brunt of Irma, weathering not only her destruction but also the impending threat of another Category 5 storm, Hurricane Maria.
The tens of thousands of Boricuas who live in Miami are anxiously staring at CNN and Twitter this morning, hoping against hope that everyone back in Puerto Rico stays safe as the apocalyptic Hurricane Maria rakes the island. Even as Miami can rest easier as the latest tracks show Maria…
Since 1933, Flamingo Gardens in Davie has been home to South Florida’s tallest tree — the Terminalia superba, otherwise known as the korina tree. Throughout the tree’s lifetime, it has survived bolts of lightning, gunshot wounds, and even the wrath of Hurricane Wilma. Alas, the hearty behemoth was no match for Irma, a Category 4 storm that tore up South Florida September 10.
Seven days after Irma, tens of thousands of homes in South Florida still have no electricity, even though FPL promised all power would be restored by this past weekend. Residents in many low-income communities, such as Allapattah, Little Haiti, Overtown, and Opa-locka, say they’ve had it the worst since FPL shut off power two days before Irma even arrived.
A group of young sailors stands helplessly on a deck as two skippers in yellow tow a shredded 200-foot-long dock away from the shore. Crushed behind it is a mangled wreck of nine sailboats, a couple of powerboats, and a 40-foot pontoon. As the dock drifts away, their worst fear is confirmed: Nothing is salvageable.
If Florida Gov. Rick Scott is wearing his blue U.S. Navy hat, it’s probably time to seek shelter. He pulls it on pretty much only when disaster is nigh. Once the National Hurricane Center begins warning that a storm is heading toward Florida, the blue brimmed beauty magically materializes on the top of his head. He never mentions it. It’s just there, covering his waxy turtle head, and we’re supposed to act like we don’t notice.
Hurricane Irma did more than decimate the Florida Keys — as Politico reporter Marc Caputo pointed out earlier this week, to “decimate” actually means to destroy every tenth person or thing, and Irma seems to have flattened much more than that in Monroe County. The same goes for Southwest Florida, and…
