Lee Commissioners
Hear Call for
Floodgate Study
Florida has been in the forefront of a national debate over how to balance development and growth while protecting our increasingly fragile environment. Why Florida? We have 8,436 miles of coastline, second only to our largest state, Alaska.
But we also have about 97% more people than Alaska. And we’re growing fast. About a thousand people move here every day; and most choose to live near the ocean. 77% of Floridians live in coastal counties, and that creates big problems when the ocean wants to move in with us. Sea level rise is the most powerful and costly consequence of climate change.
Our state is a peninsula that juts into the Gulf and Atlantic, with a topography barely poking above sea level. The highest point in all of Florida is a bridge. Sea levels in Florida rose about eight inches between 1950 and 1970, and the pace is increasing: Projections estimate another six inch rise in Miami in just the next 15 years, and a total rise of around a foot in Southwest Florida by 2050.
Bob Johnson is a mechanical engineer with 30 years experience creating ideas and solutions for Proctor and Gamble, and he’s a certified instructor for America’s Boating Club; my organization. An avid boater, he lives along the Caloosahatchee, a mile downriver from the Franklin Locks.
Like many of his neighbors, his home was flooded by Ian. “Everyone called Ian a once in a lifetime event, but I installed (home) flood barriers anyway. And they were put to use twice more as Milton and Helene tried to flood us again, but the flood barriers were able to fend off their flooding each time,” Bob recalled.
“My wife and I took a Viking cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest, and I took note of the wide array of flood control devices along the river.
That’s when I started to research how these structures and devices could be used to protect our area. I put together a Power Point, and went to the Lee Commissioners last April, and the Fort Myers City Council a month later. I tried to encourage them to ask ACOE (Army Corps of Engineers) to explore the idea of floodgates on the Caloosahatchee to protect the waterfront upriver. Wink even did a story about it, but I never heard back from anyone.
I continued my research, and saw how successful the Thames River Barrier in London, Denmark’s massive barriers and gates, and St. Petersburg Russia’s floodgates have been. I put together photos and data, and tried again with the Commissioners last Tuesday (11/4), but they couldn’t get my Power Point to work on their screen. I did learn about the County’s Disaster Advisory Council, which is required to update planning every five years. Each Commissioner can send a representative to the group, and I have applied for one of those positions,” Bob explained.
Bob thinks the best location for his proposed floodgates could be the Cape Coral Bridge, as the river narrows there, and the topography along the shores is higher than other areas. “And the Cape Coral Bridge is slated for a half a billion dollar upgrade. You could probably incorporate the flood barrier into the reconstruction costs to bring the costs down,” Bob added
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that human-caused climate change drives sea level rise; and warmer ocean waters mean stronger storms and hurricanes. But in May of 2024 Governor DeSantis, who has said he is “not a global warming person,” signed a bill into law removing most mention of climate change from state laws and policy documents. In graduate school for my Masters degree in counseling psychology, I was taught that “recognition of the problem is the first step in treatment.” I guess not all of us are at step one yet.
And a month before he signed that legislation, the digital insurance company Insurify, which assists more than 120 major insurers nationally, labeled the low-lying city of Cape Coral as “the worst city in the nation to live in if you are a climate change progressive.” Last month’s ruling by a three-judge panel of the First District Court of Appeal seems to support that notion. They ruled that the City of Cape Coral “was responsible for its own legal fees” when it “quashed” their City Manager’s attempt to recoup about two million dollars they spent on lawyers after three of its own citizens (“The Three Fishermen”) had the audacity to simply ask for a hearing to support others’ attempts to challenge the city’s removal of the Chiquita Lock for environmental reasons. Maybe Insurify has a point.
So if we can agree that Florida is the most vulnerable state to sea level rise, are Flood Gates part of the solution? Maybe.
Floodgates have been around since the 19th century. In 1928 thousands of Londoners were displaced by flooding in the Thames River. And the notorious 1953 North Sea storm killed more than 2000 throughout Europe. In 1984, the Thames Flood Barrier opened, and tidal surge flooding in the Thames ended. The entire 879 mile coast of the Netherlands is protected by some sort of surge barrier (dykes, damns, and floodgates), most notably the Maeslant Storm Barriers near Rotterdam.
If you add rivers and lakes, they have 237,000 miles of flood defenses. In a 2022 study, most residents of the Netherlands agreed that the barriers and floodgates have done a great job. The Venice (Italy) MOSE floodgate system kept the city dry after it’s highest tides in history in 2020. Installed in 2011, And St. Petersburg Russia’s 15.8 mile long Flood Control Prevention Complex includes floodgates, and is considered an effective flood deterrent.
In the US, floodgates in Providence RI, New Bedford MA, Stamford Conn., Dayton Ohio, and numerous other cities have all been considered successful, Approximately half of the city of New Orleans is currently below sea level, but the city is not underwater because of extensive flood barriers, massive pumping systems and floodgates, many installed after Katrina hit in 2005.
I asked Carrie Schuman, a Ph.D who is the Climate Resilience Advisor for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida what she thought of the idea of Floodgates in the Caloosahatchee. “Floodgates can be an important tool, but they are expensive to build and maintain, opening and closing timing is crucial, they can end up helping some areas and harming others, and they are not always feasible for some flooding areas,” she explained.
Her organization was opposed to ACOE’s original Coastal Storm Risk Management Plan for Collier County (2018-2021) which called for heavily engineered floodgates and hardened storm barriers in the Naples coastal area. Schuman’s Conservancy favored the inclusion of nature based options like dunes and berms, restored wetlands, oyster reefs, mangrove planting, and the like. “We need to be really cognizant of the trade offs when using hardened structures. And we want to make sure nature based solutions are on the table too. In addition to flood protection, they offer important benefits that hardened structures and gates don't offer,” she added.
Collier County Commissioners opted not to accept the ACOE’s original plans. The Corps’ re-initiated version of the study included only non-structural measures, some of which were nature based, but their 2023 their 2023 plan ran out of funding during the huge government cuts earlier this year. It is unclear when, if ever, funding will be restored. Schuman suggests that there’s also room for exploring options-including nature-based and hybrid strategies-outside of the Corps process.
I don’t know if Bob Johnson’s plan is feasible, and admittedly, neither does Bob Johnson, but with the total estimated costs of Hurricane’s Ian, Milton and Helene at 348 billion dollars, and total deaths said to be 434, does it make sense for ACOE to look into the idea? Recognition of the problem is the first step…
Past Commander Bob Moro AP
Fort Myers Power Squadron-America’s Boating Club
