Climate & Environment

Miami is known for getting slammed by hurricanes, which tend to blow down power lines. So after Irma knocked out electricity for roughly 90 percent of Florida Power & Light’s customers in September, many residents asked why most of FPL’s lines are still above ground. The company is now reportedly “considering” burying more of its lines, but one Miami-Dade County commissioner thinks there’s a faster route to harden Florida against storms. She wants the state to force FPL to put lines underground.

Recently, the Trump administration denied environmental protection to the Florida Keys mole skink, whose habitat is projected to disappear in the next 40 years due to sea-level rise. Now the Center for Biological Diversity is threatening a lawsuit to fight the administration’s blatant disregard for climate science and the species affected by it.

Instead of shouldering the cost of fixing its leaking cooling canals at Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Homestead, FPL is asking state regulators for permission to pass that bill — a reported $200 million — onto consumers.

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…

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.

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.