As the City of Miami Beach continues to roll out an unprecedented array of sea-level rise solutions, a top Miami engineer is worried that city officials have overlooked one key factor: Back-up generators. In the case of a major storm or hurricane, the electricity that powers the city’s expansive pump…
Every year, the massive Yachts Miami Beach event showcases hundreds of yachts along a ten-block stretch west of Collins Avenue in Mid-Beach each winter. All those boats require temporary docks to tie up to, though, and for years the company who runs the show has installed floating styrofoam structures in…
There are few people in Miami who know more about trees than Bob Brennan. In 1969, the Coconut Grove native founded Brennan’s Tree Service, a tree care and landscaping company to inspect, feed and prune trees. Now an arborist at Fairchild Tropic Garden, Brennan is one of Miami’s foremost experts…
Today, the City of Miami Beach Commission will hold its first meeting after the literally trashy events of Floatopia on April 16th, and as promised City Manager Jimmy L. Morales has prepared suggestions on how to deal with the event and ones similar to it in the future. Morales’s suggestion…
Picture this: In less than a century, ice in Greenland and Antarctica has melted far more rapidly than even the most dire predictions. The seas worldwide have risen by meters, swamping coastal cities like Miami. Even worse, the rapid melt has led Atlantic currents like the Gulf Stream to collapse,…
To many residents in Coconut Grove, trees are sacred. The neighborhood has long been known for its giant oaks, banyans and hardwoods that create an iconic tree cover. But over the last decade, that cover has been under increasing threat. As the neighborhood has undergone rapid development, some of the…
In a letter to the Miami Beach Commission, City Manager Jimmy L. Morales has detailed what he believes went wrong and lead to the trash disaster after this weekend’s Floatopia event. His explanation can be best summed up by lightly tweaking some classic Milli Vanilli lyrics: ” Blame it on the rain…
Miami’s cuteness quotient is about to fly off the charts. Over the past few months, as the weather warmed, stray cats across South Florida got, well, frisky. And now, hundreds of furry bundles of joy are being born across Miami-Dade. Sadly, many of those kittens are abandoned by their mothers…
The poster-sized map on Bruce Mowry’s desk is scrawled with blotchy patches of red, showing elevations across Miami Beach. Everywhere 2.2 feet or lower is shaded in deep crimson. That’s the same height, incidentally, that water reached last September during the King Tide, the highest nonstorm water level ever recorded…
Well, congratulations Miami. We’ve ruined Floatopia. The latest edition of the biannual beach bacchanal boosting all things buoyant drew tens of thousands of revelers to South Pointe Park on Saturday, but the partiers left behind mountains of trash. Now city officials are calling for an end to the event, seemingly…
Two years ago, 38-year-old Ale Ochoa heard that the Redland, the unincorporated mostly agricultural area of Southwest Miami-Dade County north of Homestead, had become a dumping ground for dogs. She did not believe it, so she drove to the area herself. “I came across injured, sick, and malnourished dogs. They…
Every morning, researcher Tom Jackson photographs the sunrise from Virginia Key, where he works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Some mornings as he walks out to the shoreline he finds the area empty and quiet. Other days, he spots interesting insects, plants and animals. During a morning…
Talk to a certain kind of native Floridian about sea level rise and they’ll scoff at the idea that the floods regularly swamping cars and drowning businesses in South Beach are anything new. “Why, I remember a flood in 1962 that you can’t imagine!” they’ll say. Sorry, old timey climate…
A half-mile off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, 35 feet below the ocean’s surface, two battery-powered golden-yellow submarines the size of Volkswagen Beetles puttered around Barracuda Reef. In one submarine’s cabin — a transparent sphere that looks like a giant fishbowl — sat Rachel Silverstein, a dark-haired PhD who holds…
For the past two years, the City of Miami has fought hard to convince the public and politicians in Key Biscayne to back their plans for hosting the Miami International Boat Show on Virginia Key. Central among the city’s pledges was to create a public park on part of the waterfront…
The seas are rising. And Miami is in grave danger of going under. Anyone who lives in South Florida and isn’t living in a Marco Rubio-sized bubble of denial knows these facts by know, and the national press has been pounding the story into the ground over recent months. But…
Florida panthers are an extremely endangered species. Even the most optimistic estimates of their population don’t reach above 200 individuals. So when humans go around doing their human things it’s quite rare for them to randomly come across a wild panther doing its wild panthers thing. Yet, this week Florida has…
A 1931 home at 22 Star Island was placed on industrial-grade wheels yesterday, rotated 180 degrees, and moved to the other side of the property, where it will be fully restored. Lennar CEO Stuart Miller owns the home, which was designed by Martin Hampton, a renowned local architect who also…
For years, animal rights activists have argued that Miami Seaquarium is breaking federal law by keeping its orca, Lolita, in a tank that’s too small. Now they say a new statement by the agency that regulates those tanks bolsters their argument. According to the Animal Welfare Act, the minimum space…
Yesterday SeaWorld announced it would stop breeding orcas, the latest fallout from the Blackfish documentary. The news comes on the heels of the theme park’s announcement that the company will also construct larger, more “natural” habitats for its killer whales. Miami activists celebrated the news — but were also left…
At last night’s GOP debate at the University of Miami, moderator Jack Tapper posed a question that came from none other than Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado, a Republican who has endorsed Marco Rubio, to Rubio himself. The topic was climate change. It was a pretty simple question: “Climate change means…
For three weeks, a self professed “animal rights warrior” named Danielle Daals has been living in a bathtub in front of the Miami Seaquarium to protest the marine park’s captivity of cetaceans, including Lolita the orca. Jeff Geragi, the president of the Miami-based Animal Activists Network, whose members helped plan…
