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…
What does it take to publish a brilliant feature story, pictures, and cover when there’s no electricity or internet, and writers are pinned down by 100 mile per hour winds? The answer is ingenuity, luck, and communication over more than 6,000 miles. Miami New Times doesn’t have fancy generators or…
The South Dade Center is a subsidized housing project for the huge farmworker community in Homestead, the rural town south of Miami that has been repeatedly blasted by hurricanes since Andrew hit in 1992. Most of the area’s residents are of Mexican or Central American descent and make little money working in the sun-baked fields and plant nurseries that feed the rest of Florida.
The National Hurricane Center is reporting that two new storm systems are forming in the far eastern Atlantic. While they are far from Miami, both show a 70 percent probability of becoming tropical depressions within five days. The NHC is predicting a more southerly track for the pair than Hurricane…
Standing defiantly in the distance off Islamorada is a century-old lighthouse that has survived much more than the wimpy winds of Hurricane Irma. The Alligator Lighthouse was built in 1873, before Miami even existed. The name honors a pirate-fighting schooner that sank there in 1822 and was blown up so…
Every year, more than a half million people flock to the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens and the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Hurricane Irma, though, severely damaged both Vizcaya — an early 20th century Italian-style estate built by James Deering — and Fairchild, one of the world’s greatest repositories of tropical…
The line snapped in the screaming gusts, and Randy knew he was in deep trouble. White-capped waves battered the chipped hull of Hardball, his 36-foot fishing boat, while 100 mph winds tore through the faded blue canvas over the captain’s chair. In the middle of Hurricane Irma’s Sunday afternoon assault…
