Chapter 2

Florida National Guard – Dade/Broward HQ. June 2061

The eye of Hurricane Belinda ripped through Miami on June 3, 2061 allowing the commander of the Florida National Guard at the Dade/Broward HQ a few minutes to go out and enjoy the sunshine, and he reflected on the situation. The Federal troops had been withdrawn from the cities of America over the last two months. Not a shot was fired by an American soldier at an American citizen – or non-citizen resident. The borders were still mostly closed and the tourist industry was screaming bloody murder. Every border entry point was manned by an automatic rifle toting soldier or soldiers.

Every incoming container on a ship was inspected by a pair of soldiers. This resulted in an enormous increase in seized contraband of all types: people, guns, drugs, and other illegal things. That greatly slowed the transit time of all sorts of goods and caused disruption on the U.S. economy – and a corresponding downturn in the world’s economy.

The Florida Guard’s Colonel David Respach looked down at the water that was flooding the parking lot in western Broward County – it was about six inches deep. The elevation here was 6 feet above the old-measure of sea level. The last time the US Geodesic Service had updated the map was in 2040. At that time, ‘sea level’ was 1.48 feet higher than the previous reading in 2020 – at least Florida’s MEASL – or Mean Elevation Above Sea Level – dropped by that much. In 2060 a revised estimate was made, and Florida lost another 2 feet. Most of Dade (where Miami was) and Broward counties were now only two feet above the average sea level, and the water table was so close to the surface that the ground squished when it was trod upon. Water ran in the streets of Miami Beach almost all the time.

At least, water had run in the streets of what used to be Miami Beach. Now everything that used to be the heavily populated and developed barrier islands from Key Biscayne in the south to Bal Harbor farther north was rubble. The barrier islands were no more and the buildings that were on the islands were so much scattered rubble covering the bottom of the former Biscayne Bay. Now ‘Biscayne Bay’ was only a part of the Atlantic Ocean; there was nothing to mark the border between the bay and the ocean. Future archeologists may pore through the muck of this part of the Atlantic and gaze in wonder at the remains of plasma TVs and beachfront condos.

All the bridges that used to connect the islands to the mainland now ended suddenly in pylons and were now ‘bridges to nowhere.’

Hurricane Belinda was a Force 4 storm – an unusually strong storm that had run up the Florida coast and turned in just a bit north of Miami, but not the strongest that there could be. A Force 5 hurricane used to be the highest level there was. So many strong storms happened in the middle of the 21^st century that Force 6 was invented. Belinda was a direct hit that seemed to be designed to demolish the Florida Keys and south Florida before unleashing a disaster on the Miami area. Key West and the string of islands were gone; most of them had been underwater for years.

The Colonel checked the sky and he could see the eye-wall coming his way from the southeast. He shrugged into his waterproof jacket and went back inside the HQ building. The former police station was on a south Florida ‘mountain’ – it was a good 11 feet above the old sea level. 9.5 feet above the 2040 revised sea level and 7.5 feet above the 2060 sea level. He splashed through six inches of water on his way back toward the building.

Once inside, he unrolled the map of south Florida. All the nice little islands on the west coast of the Floridian peninsula were gone. Most of the coastal cities had lost a significant portion of their waterfront. The Everglades was now a salt water marsh stretching the 100 miles or so all the way up to Lake Okeechobee, and the snakes, alligators, deer, bears and other wildlife had long since disappeared. The shoreline of the lake had given way about 12 years ago and was now virtually an inlet of the open ocean, 110 miles to the south.

The fact that other places had it just as bad – or worse – was little comfort. Bangladesh had virtually disappeared, between the sea level rise and the tsunami of 2053, 65% of the land mass was gone and something over 70 million people had died. In the Philippines, 13% of the land mass had disappeared beneath the waves. Throughout Micronesia, scores of small countries simply were no more; their populations absorbed into larger, more stable places.

In the U.S., southern Louisiana had almost disappeared. One had to take an ‘over water’ causeway to the island city of New Orleans. That town had simply decided not to give up, but the Mississippi River now ended just north of Baton Rouge. The state’s capital had moved to Alexandria, on a ‘temporary’ basis. NOLA was now an island.