home, n. A person’s own country or native land. Also: the country of one’s ancestors.
Until she moved to Florida, Jenny Wolfe had never seen a hurricane and never imagined how storms like this would both upend her life and define her work.
She grew up in Iowa—a state often troubled by tornadoes but nothing as gargantuan and watery as a tropical cyclone. Then she moved to the Sunshine State in 1996 with a boyfriend who had set his sights on an out-of-the-Midwest college experience—specifically at the University of Florida at Gainesville.
Gainesville lies inland and thus is sheltered from the full force of tropical storms—though Jenny experienced a few alarming moments with the edges of hurricanes as they crossed over the central Florida area. In an especially ferocious storm in 2004, I remember feeling scared enough to push up a mattress against our apartment window and sit in the closet because something sounded like an explosion, a nearby transformer. The hurricane had that train sound like a tornado.
Her first academic major in Gainesville was architecture, but the field never felt like it fit her properly. Eventually she switched to political science. Then I learned there was a thing called historic preservation, a profession that involves saving, protecting, and documenting buildings, objects, and artifacts that offer up evidence of the long arc of the human story. And she realized she was drawn to historic places and old architecture. She enrolled in the University of Florida’s graduate program and researched a thesis about Cedar Key, a town on a group of islands, also called the Cedar Keys, off the state’s west coast in the Gulf of Mexico. These islands had in the nineteenth century been a source of cedar for pencil production, a port, and a railroad terminus. They held a pair of productive timber mills (one of which had briefly employed famed conservationist John Muir, who also had the misfortune of contracting malaria there). But the Cedar Keys were ravaged by an 1896 hurricane that killed about a hundred people and destroyed the mills. In the years that followed the community went through a period of economic decline. It is now mostly a tourist destination and fishing community with a historic site, museum, and a handful of seafood restaurants.
Jenny observed that Cedar Key, surprisingly, had no particular plan for protecting its historic structures from the next hurricane. Her thesis offered a nearly exhaustive review of the community’s historic assets, along with a recommendation for the site’s stewards to use mapping technology like Geographic Information Systems, GIS, to make a record of what was there before disaster struck again. These disasters are predictable in terms of their nature and ability to have a devastatingly widespread impact, she wrote.
But in 2011, when she was hired as the historic preservation officer of the City of St. Augustine, a burg of fifteen thousand people on Florida’s northeast coast, she didn’t think she would still be planning for floods and storms.
By disposition, Jenny is an organized person—in appearance, fine-boned, with long, blond hair and a heart-shaped face; in dress and manner, neat but not ostentatious, with a formal way of speaking, especially about her work.
But her feelings about her new job and home would eventually go far beyond formality. It was an overwhelming but rewarding job, and she would grow to love this storied place. Established in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied European-settled city in the United States—sometimes nicknamed the Ancient City. Her new desk stood inside city hall, which shares space with a quirky museum of antiquities and high art inside the old nineteenth-century Alcazar Hotel—a Spanish Renaissance Revival building capped with ornately carved terra-cotta and brick towers, like a reverse red-velvet layer cake.
A block away lies the old Spanish plaza, laid out in 1573, with archaeological finds now interred beneath almost every bench and lamppost. And from there, the historic details spread out in all directions like chapters in an epic. The city’s most iconic structure is a star-shaped seventeenth-century stone fortress called the Castillo de San Marcos—built from coquina, a stone formed by the compression of piles of tiny clamshells deposited here more than a hundred thousand years ago (when much of what is now Florida was underwater). North of city hall is a tight cluster of narrow eighteenth-century colonial streets full of shops. And to the south lies a neighborhood called Lincolnville—one of the key battlegrounds of the 1960s civil rights movement. In the streets beyond here you can find all of the charming poshness and kitsch of Florida—midcentury drive-in motels with neon signs and turquoise swimming pools and flashy tourist attractions such as a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum and a pirate museum.
Jenny moved to St. Augustine during a spate of calm weather: for a handful of years, there were no major storms. But her arrival was also the beginning of a new reckoning with the oceans. Climate change has been a difficult subject politically in Florida. But a decade ago, at least some federal and state experts and Florida civic leaders claimed they were owning up to the troubles that were being unleashed on the state by warming air and rising water. In 2009, the U.S. government released the second National Climate Assessment (the first was in 2000). It contained a formal if banal acknowledgment that climate change had already arrived, that the storms brewing in the Southeast carried extra charge and force because of it, and that the sea had already risen and would continue to climb up onto the land and carry more water into yards and streets and highways. Meanwhile, the population of Florida had doubled in the past three decades, and “the quality of life for existing residents is likely to be affected by the many challenges associated with climate change,” the report noted. A few months later, four counties down the coast from St. Augustine—Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Broward, and Monroe—formed an entity called the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact. Their founding resolution acknowledged that, because of the unfortunate combination of low-lying land and rising seas, the region’s five-million-plus residents would face “disproportionately high risks associated with climate change.” The counties pledged to push for policies both to cope with these risks and to reduce carbon emissions. (This pledge was promising but didn’t prevent Governor Rick Scott from purportedly banning the term “climate change” from official use in the middle of his time in office from 2011 to 2019. Nor has it prevented real estate tycoons from planning expensive housing developments in flood-vulnerable areas.)
At the federal level, the Obama White House also directed agencies to produce adaptation plans—something like what Jenny had written for the Cedar Keys but based on future projections, which were much more sobering than the experiences of the past. The National Park Service, which oversees the National Register of Historic Places and hundreds of historic sites—including the Castillo de San Marcos—released its first plans for managing climate-related troubles in 2010 and 2012.
Between 2012 and 2014, St. Augustine added a new seawall to the waterfront boulevard, Avenida Menendez, with money from the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. This was intended as an improvement on two older seawalls, better protection against floods than the first one, made by the Spanish in 1696, and the second, built by graduates of the U.S. Military Academy in the mid-nineteenth century—and torn apart by a hurricane in 1846 and a tropical storm in 2008. But the wall is only high enough* for a Category 1 storm, the least severe. Two years later, the state of Florida launched a series of pilot studies, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, on coastal flooding in three communities. One would be St. Augustine: an evaluation of how this city might fare as the waters rose.
By this time, Jenny had gone through some personal disruptions and transitions. The Gainesville boyfriend had become a husband and then an ex. She moved alone to an apartment in a neighborhood called Davis Shores. It had been platted in the 1920s on Anastasia Island, a barrier island across the river from the city center, and built up during a series of mid-twentieth-century real estate booms. Jenny’s place was a 1940s garage that had been transformed into a cottage. It was dainty and mint green with a metal roof, its inner walls covered in heart pine tongue-and-groove paneling. She dearly loved this place, a space of her own. She planted three raised garden beds full of vegetables and adopted a puppy. But Davis Shores is low-lying and susceptible to regular soaking by the tides. Already, even on a sunny day, a high tide could send water from the estuary into the creeks, to the storm drains, to the streets, dampening the underbellies of the cars parked there.
St. Augustine’s sea level rise report came back from the state of Florida and NOAA in June 2016 and offered an alarming prognosis for the city. With one and a half feet of sea level rise, nearly a third of the city’s road network would frequently be swamped by the highest high tides and small storms and a fifth to half of the buildings and structures in the downtown historic district would flood around once a month or more. This scenario could be reality as soon as the 2040s, according to the report. By about two and a half feet, the city would have passed a tipping point: twenty-four times as many buildings would be vulnerable to tidal flooding every day. This could happen as soon as the 2050s if global society kept gasping out carbon rapidly.
Then in late September 2016, as if to illustrate how powerful and raucous water and wind could be, Hurricane Matthew rose up from the Caribbean. It was a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest possible designation on the basis of wind speed, the first storm of this level of ferocity to spin through the Atlantic Basin since 2007. At its peak, off the coast of Colombia, Matthew huffed out 165-mile-per-hour winds. The storm weakened a little to a Category 4, then slammed into Haiti on October 4 (with winds still at 150 miles per hour), and here it produced a horrifying disaster, killing an estimated one thousand people, razing 80 percent of the buildings in the city of Jérémie, ripping apart crop fields, and flooding villages. Then it struck Cuba, furiously attacking the province of Guantánamo and tearing the roofs off houses. Then it continued northward.
An evacuation order for St. John’s County, wherein lay St. Augustine, began early in the morning on Thursday while Matthew was pummeling the Bahamas, and Jenny left for a friend’s house farther inland, west of the city. There, she anxiously watched news reports and Facebook videos of the rising waters.
As the hurricane approached Florida, it remained at sea: “the western edge of Matthew’s eyewall barely clipped NASA’s Cape Canaveral launch facility,” read a report from the National Hurricane Center. By the time it traveled past St. Augustine and Jacksonville, it was a Category 3 (120-mile-per-hour winds) shifting toward a Category 2 (110 miles per hour). It never made landfall in Florida, striking South Carolina instead. St. Augustine could be considered, in the grand scheme of things, lucky.
But even good luck in a hurricane can still look rough. In video footage from the storm, St. Augustine resembled an underwater ruin, palms flopping limply like grass in the wind, streets full of turbulent rivers.
On Saturday, Jenny drove her car back into the city under a jarringly blue sky. I was driving through—I don’t want to say a war zone—but it felt like you’re going to a site of devastation. Downed fences. Fallen trees and debris. Signs wrenched off posts. Halloween pumpkins transported by floodwaters, heaped on the street.
At city hall, although someone had piled sandbags in front of the doors, water had seeped through some windows on the side of the building, drenching a ground-floor conference room and ruining the carpet and flooring. At the museum that shared the same building, it had flooded the hallway, the basement, and a historic pool that had been drained and was functioning as a café.
Later that day, Jenny crossed the bridge—the Bridge of Lions, built in 1926 and adorned with actual marble lions—to her own neighborhood. When she arrived at her apartment, she saw that Matthew had swept up miscellaneous belongings from the yards and storage units nearby and strewn the alley in front with garments, outdoor furniture, and bicycles. The floodwaters had soaked the rooms inside her place, ruining her old wedding album, shoes, kitchen appliances, a dresser full of clothes, thumb drives, and various other personal effects she’d left there. Throughout the island, the wastewater system had overflowed, and the city warned residents to boil their water (in case traces of human waste ended up in the tap). Her place emitted a powerful odor that she would remember vividly but never be able to describe, stranger and more potent than sewage.
After sizing up the mess, she donned rubber boots and gloves to salvage what she could of her home. In the next few weeks, she would turn her attention to the rest of the city, to help other St. Augustinians recover, to try to protect the place from the next flood.
The storm wasn’t as bad as it might have been. But it carried a more powerful symbolism than some of the hurricanes before it. It was a moment of foreshadowing that would force tough questions about the city’s future—and what everyone living there would do when the water arrived again and again at their doorsteps. Jenny would put her efforts toward helping the city she loved stay safe for as long as possible.
To have any kind of home, you must have at least a little history. If you reside somewhere only one day, it’s not home yet. You have to accumulate stories and a sense of familiarity. Writ larger, to have a nation, you need a story about origins. Collectively, we must be able to write ourselves onto the landscapes we inhabit in some sensible way.
So many human histories start at coasts, and the United States is no different. People often arrive in a place by water and are drawn again and again to make homes near the edge of the sea. But you can never live in or near this littoral zone without reckoning with the power of the ocean. The sea will almost always have the last word on what happens to coastal land.
Beginning at least five thousand years ago, the ancestors of Florida’s Indigenous groups (including the Timucua and Calusa, both of whom may have later integrated into the Seminole Tribe) built mounds along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coasts—comprised mostly of shells from oysters and clams, which they ate in prodigious quantities, along with other material like pottery, bone, and charcoal. Academics and archaeologists used to think shell mounds were just ancient trash heaps. But most scholars now believe they were far more sophisticated. Mounds are human-made landforms, a type of Indigenous engineering. They can take the form of ridges, rings, hills, even entire islands. Ken Sassaman, an archaeologist at the University of Florida and an expert on mounds, calls this terraforming, a term borrowed from science fiction, usually referring to the process of building a world from scratch. Shell mounds may have had various functions: they were perhaps shelters from wind and waves (homes were sometimes built on the leeward sides), elevated building pads for houses or monuments, ceremonial sites, or plazas. They were often oriented in the precise direction of the rising sun on the summer or winter solstice.
At some mounds, there is evidence of regular feasts and celebrations. “These were world renewal ceremonies—ritual practices to bring the world back to balance,” Sassaman believes. To balance and renew the world, you had to connect with your ancestors and share stories about both the past and the future.
In some locations, people buried their dead inside the mounds. Sometimes the people of this era would even dig up and move entire cemeteries full of bones and relocate them to new places.
Sassaman thinks they did this to keep their ancestors from washing away in the tide. And keeping track of their forebears and their history was arguably part of survival. During the era of mound-building, the ocean rose slowly, perhaps an inch or two every fifty years, less than half to one-third of the current rate of sea level rise. But there were sometimes sudden disruptions—such as a hurricane tearing apart and drowning the land. The people who built Florida’s mounds probably knew the sea could change, Sassaman contends, because they had a long memory and a record of history, kept alive both by oral tradition and by the structure and symbolism of the mounds. Knowing about the floods of the past could help them prepare for those of the future. Indigenous cultures often had a cyclical sense of time. “The future is more certain for people that look to the past,” he says.
By contrast, to have an ahistorical world—to forget the past—can be dangerous. Paradoxically, it can make a society less able to perceive and respond to change.
The modern American relationship with history is inconsistent and fractured. Many of our most revered national memories, historic architecture, and monuments stand at the coasts. Yet we have had a tendency to knock down old buildings in favor of erecting new ones. And for the last few years, shimmering new real estate developments, glassy luxury condos, palatial beach houses, and boxy McMansions have flowered like weeds all along the Atlantic coast, from Boston to Miami, even in areas that are already prone to floods or will be in the near future. Estimates of the real estate damages wrought by rising seas vary enormously across sources, but they usually run into the billions. According to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, for instance, in about two and a half decades, roughly 136 billion dollars’ worth of real estate on both the East and the West Coast could suffer from chronic flooding.
By the end of the century, if the world emits carbon at the highest and most disastrous rates, that figure could rise to more than a trillion dollars, and one million homes in Florida alone could be soaked by the sea more than twice a month on average. Every coastal community worldwide will bear the impact, and both the world’s wealthier citizens, living in cities such as Miami, New York, and Amsterdam, and its poorer ones, in places like Lagos and Dhaka, will ultimately feel the losses.
Too often, the American approach to these eventualities is to look away. In 2012, real estate developers successfully pushed North Carolina legislators to ban the use of scientific predictions that foresee catastrophic sea level rise in any state and local agency coastal planning. Such a policy is akin to making it illegal for North Carolinians to imagine the future. Sometimes it feels as if the United States exists in a suspended state of now, as if we are pretending the past has never been and the future will never arrive.
Historical records tell us that the sea was lower when we first built our coastal cities and towns, our roads and bridges. And it keeps rising. We haven’t readied our homes for the water of the future, and we haven’t reckoned with what we are all about to lose.
There are two main ways that heating the planet causes the seas to rise. One, as water warms, it expands. So a warmer ocean simply takes up more space. Two, much of the planet’s water is locked up in large masses of ice—such as the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and mountain glaciers. When this ice melts and turns to water, it runs to the sea, as water will do. Since at least the 1970s and 1980s, scientists have known that the extra heat that was being trapped in the atmosphere by our carbon emissions would also enlarge the volume of the oceans, and the rise of the seas has gathered speed in the decades since. This trend is not reversible on the time scale of a human life. You can’t put the ice back, and the carbon that we have already sent into the atmosphere and the heat energy now stored in the oceans guarantees that they will keep rising.
The same set of circumstances also means that coastal weather will keep growing more intense. The now-agitated atmosphere unleashes its extra heat energy in the form of storms and hurricanes. So this much is certain: anyone who lives at the coasts will be confronted with more water, more wind, and more deluges, now and in the future.
But human society still gets to choose how severe the problem becomes. The rate and extent of future sea level rise depends on carbon emissions. Our choices will have a direct impact on St. Augustine: in just one lifetime, will its streets fill with calf-deep or waist-deep water during the highest tides? You could imagine the place coping with and adapting to the first scenario and falling to ruin in the second.
A few years ago, I began learning about sea level rise, hurricanes, and coastal adaptation through the eyes of those who had dedicated their lives to history and not just from the experts trained to prognosticate the future. The conundrums the historic preservation community is facing and the solutions they have tried to pursue—in old cities like Boston or New York or Newport, Rhode Island—seemed more realistic to me than, say, wild designs for futuristic floating cities or hurricane-proof houses (which might withstand a storm but wouldn’t be terribly functional if the community around them was crushed). I couldn’t imagine how we would face the future without taking stock of the past. I didn’t think we should move forward into the twenty-first century without hanging on to some of what our ancestors had built or some of the stories they had handed us. How would we make meaningful and enduring homes and communities if we lost all of the trials and errors and lessons that came before us?
Many historic preservationists and planners look to Europe as an example of how to prepare for water to arrive in landscapes deeply imprinted by history—and often full of old, immovable architecture. In some cases, you try to save what’s important; in others, you have to let it go. The goal is to choose deliberately and wisely. Some European approaches have involved letting the water in. For instance, a roughly decade-long Dutch project called “Room for the River,” begun in 2007, bought out houses and properties along the Rhine, the Meuse, the Waal, and the IJssel Rivers in the Netherlands and helped residents relocate, and then opened up the floodplains so that rising waters had a place to go.†
Other approaches involve trying to keep the water out, but in a time of rapid water rise, this is a trickier proposition. For one thing, it is difficult to divorce a water-bound economy and culture from the ocean by cleaving the two with a wall or barrier. On a trip through Italy, I spoke to a few locals in Venice about the enormous tidal gates the city was building—a project that has become infamous because of cost overruns (with a total price tag of around $8 billion), decades of delays, and a corruption investigation. Some Venetians distrust and disapprove of the whole endeavor. The gates are designed to rise up and defend the city, barring stormwaters from entering, the way medieval castle gates kept out invading soldiers. But they are only intended for the highest of tides and storm surges, because to close them is to shut down boat traffic, temporarily isolating the city and the port. Nearly half of Venice can still flood before the gates rise up.
I spoke to one environmental scientist in her brick-lined office overlooking one of the city’s famous canals. She called it “propaganda” to suggest that the gates alone could save Venice. In October 2020, the project entered a trial phase, and the gates were deployed against a flood for the first time. They successfully kept a major tidal flood away from the famous San Marco Square and the cathedral. But they are manned based on the weather. Two months later, when the forecast failed to accurately predict the tides, the gates were not activated, and four and half feet of water rushed into Venice.
There will be a time in the future when the city can’t keep raising and lowering the gates. Eventually the sea may have the last word on what happens to Venice.
Historic cities in the United States face the same sorts of quandaries. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Lisa Craig, then the chief of historic preservation of Annapolis, Maryland, launched a discussion about preparing for sea level rise. This seaport, first built by seventeenth-century Puritans and later expanded by oystermen, holds quintessential pieces of the American story and collective identity. George Washington resigned his commission as commander in chief of the U.S. Army in the Annapolis State House in 1783. From 1783 to 1784, the city served as the U.S. capital. Here the U.S. Naval Academy—full of granite-walled, slate-roofed, Beaux Arts–style buildings—has trained some of America’s most important political and military minds: Jimmy Carter and John McCain, twenty-six members of Congress, fifty-four astronauts, and five state governors. But NOAA had recently revealed that Annapolis was also a hot spot of “nuisance flooding.” Over about fifty years, the frequency of chronic flooding in Annapolis increased by 925 percent and, in about four more decades, it is predicted to occur about fourteen times more often again.
Craig held a major public engagement campaign called “Weather It Together” to push the city to plan better for coastal flooding disasters and to make decisions about which of its historic resources it would try to protect. But when a new mayor was elected in 2017, Craig felt the city’s interest in the subject beginning to ebb, and she resigned.
A year after this, I visited the Annapolis City Dock—a quaint area of brick sidewalks, a marina, some historic inns, and a few shops and restaurants at the waterfront—with an architect named Michael Dowling, a longtime expert on historic preservation. Serious looking but congenial, with white, windblown hair, a close-trimmed beard, and a furrowed brow, he had worked to fix up a theater in downtown Annapolis after Hurricane Isabel drenched the place in 2003. He has since provided expertise to the city and to local and regional organizations on how to protect historic buildings from sea level rise. His theater restoration project had taken a decade. Meanwhile, protection efforts by the City Dock still felt piecemeal. The city planned to install a stormwater pumping system. Some property owners had raised their foundations. Others were using devices called “door dams” to try to keep tidal floods out. We stood in front of the theater, painted a stormy-sea blue with a steeply angled red roof, and looked up the street. Here Dowling had carefully tested and selected mortars and materials to rebuild the centuries-old brick and wood exterior after Hurricane Isabel. “High tide is projected to be at the top of their doorsill twice a day,” he said mournfully. “That’s just a regular tide. Let alone a storm surge or anything. And elevating historic buildings is difficult and expensive. And there’s still a school of preservation that says you shouldn’t do it.”
He pointed to some buildings in the distance where the owners had raised the foundation. You could do this, property by property, he mused, all the way up the waterfront, though the city would still have streets that turned into canals on a high-tide day.
“To save us in 2050, we need a seawall that’s several feet higher. Who’s gonna pay for it?” he said. And big sea barriers, like the one in Venice, can create their own problems.
“Then you close off stormwater from getting out to the bay. You could cause flooding from the water that’s coming down the Severn River and the creeks. And another approach is, let it happen. Abandon and retreat, and that’ll just continue up Main Street.”
The next year, a citizen advisory committee would come together to protect the City Dock, and Michael Dowling would continue to provide expertise. The community has since considered a series of strategies that would buy time and keep some of the flooding out of this water-prone place—including raising a walkway, building a seawall, and installing a (possibly retractable) barrier—but the price tag remains high, up to $50 million or more. Parts of the City Dock are now underwater fifty to sixty days per year.
People can try to hang on to places like Annapolis at a steep cost, or they can simply choose to neglect them and let the sea take them. These are the choices.
When she arrived in St. Augustine, Leslee Keys, also a preservationist by trade, thought she might be mostly done with hurricanes. The city is partially protected from storms by both coastal geography and a barrier island. So there was a sense that South Florida had the real hurricane problems. In 1999, after Hurricane Floyd, the Tallahassee Democrat ran an article that even suggested the city had some mystical form of protection: “Watched over by a 300-year-old Spanish Fort, a cross built after the last hurricane, and a mysterious statue of the Virgin Mary … there was little structural damage to the historic buildings and homes in this northeast Florida city.”
But Leslee quickly realized the city wasn’t altogether immune to tropical storms. I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes. I tend to pay a lot of attention.
Before moving to St. Augustine in the late 1990s, Leslee had spent four years working for the state historic preservation office in the Florida Keys (a random but somehow apt coincidence of place-name and personal name). Part of her job was to help historic properties there recover from Hurricane Andrew, which was in 1992 the costliest disaster in the United States (until it was surpassed by several others, including Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012). The other part was to instruct them in how to prepare for floods still to come. She grew up in Indiana, but the Florida Keys had given her a fast education in hurricane preparedness. And the small necklace of islands that extends from the bottom of the state had a more matter-of-fact approach toward hurricanes than the mainland. In the Keys, when there’s a hurricane warning, everybody gets ready for a hurricane party, because you’re at the end of the world’s longest extension cord. You don’t evacuate when you have 140 miles to drive between islands. And Leslee—who seems able to inject humor and whimsy into almost anything—was good at talking about disaster in a way that was somehow realistic and not off-putting at the same time. I’m not afraid of hurricanes, she said unflinchingly. But I’m really efficient when it comes to getting prepared for them. In the Keys, Leslee had trained librarians and museum curators to make plans to protect their collections from storms. If you’re down to that seventy-two-hour window before a hurricane, you should know how many hours it takes you to do particular things, like pack up antique furniture and pottery, board up windows, or move archives and rare books well above flood elevation.
In St. Augustine, Leslee worked her way through several roles at Flagler College, meanwhile also earning a Ph.D. in historic preservation from the University of Florida. She learned that the college’s flagship building, another lavish antique hotel called Ponce de Leon Hall—also built by Henry Flagler and now serving as a student dormitory known affectionately as the Ponce—had sustained significant roof damage during Floyd.‡ Then in 2004, Hurricane Frances blew out a sliding glass wall under the red clay dome that capped the Ponce. A few years later the institution secured grant money to install hurricane-proof glass.
But even after this—and after successive storms like Hurricanes Ivan, Jeanne, Katrina, and Wilma, and Tropical Storm Fay visited Florida—St. Augustine wasn’t prepared for a major hit from a tropical cyclone. Perhaps this was partly because the real estate industry and some property owners didn’t want to own up to the danger, lest the admission damage property values. The Ponce and the Alcazar Hotel (that is, city hall) are arguably symbols of a Florida trait almost as defining and powerful as hurricanes—the pursuit of fantasy. Flagler College’s namesake, the nineteenth-century entrepreneur Henry Flagler, is widely considered the father of modern Florida. In 1870, he cofounded Standard Oil (part of which later became Chevron) with John D. Rockefeller, then more than a decade later used the wealth he had amassed from oil refining to buy railroads, extend them around Florida, and put up a series of hotels across the state, including St. Augustine’s most famous nineteenth-century edifices. The fantasy of Florida as a paradise for tourists and retirees has continued into the twenty-first century, and real estate developers, speculators, and property owners have sometimes been reluctant to recognize reality—that both pieces of Flagler’s legacy, the oil industry and the coastal real estate boom, have set the state running toward a nightmarish scenario in which rising seas will collide with properties worth billions of dollars.
All of this denial was compounded by the city being full of new migrants—especially snowbirds, retirees who winter in Florida. Many of them head north during warmer months, effectively avoiding firsthand experience of part of hurricane season. Leslee and her husband had bought a 1928 house that stood on a small ridge (not big enough to be called a hill) in Fullerwood Park, two blocks from the Intracoastal Waterway, and she also noticed over the years how the streets around her filled with more and more water from tidal flooding, even on sunny days. But newer property owners wouldn’t have perceived a worsening situation, just an ongoing problem for the city to fix.
How are we going to teach these people who have moved here in the last decade? Leslee thought.
The threat, not just to St. Augustine but to the entire nation’s historic landmarks, became all too vivid in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy ransacked facilities and museum buildings on Liberty Island, where the Statue of Liberty lifts her lamp, and Ellis Island, the nation’s historic immigration station. The reports of Sandy shocked Leslee, and she dedicated more and more of her time to helping historic preservationists plan for sea level rise and the amped-up storm cycles climate change was beginning to deliver.
She began collaborating with St. Augustine and with Jenny Wolfe on issues like resiliency planning—that is, proactively increasing a community’s ability to withstand future disasters. In 2016, Leslee organized a workshop on building codes and flooding. It was scheduled for that November.
Then Matthew arrived.
In addition to trashing Jenny Wolfe’s beloved garage apartment, the hurricane soaked Leslee’s planned workshop venue—the room in St. Augustine’s city hall where the city commission also meets. It also poured water onto the Flagler College campus and into the basement of the Ponce. She still held the workshop in a nearby nondrenched location. But her focus by then was also on helping the recovery efforts. Hurricane Matthew had howled a loud message at the city, far louder than anything she could have arranged herself. Matthew was like a test run for future flooding, laying St. Augustine’s weaknesses bare. Major landmarks throughout the city fared relatively well. For instance, the Castillo de San Marcos looked as if the storm had barely touched it, while the National Park Service offices at the edge of the grounds got a thorough soaking. The city’s nineteenth-century alligator farm weathered things fine: the alligators merely floated up in the surge and descended back down when the water retreated. But some private homes, including historic homes, had major damage.
Anyone who needed personal assistance from FEMA had to fill out paperwork and leap bureaucratic hurdles. FEMA wasn’t coming out to help us, Jenny Wolfe observed angrily. We had to go to each of our buildings in the city with our small staff and check a box on a form. She and her colleagues enlisted volunteers. Leslee gathered a group of students to walk with her to homes in and around the downtown core and help people file for disaster recovery money.
Then, while still reeling from the damage to her own living space, Jenny began knocking on doors herself. She focused on the blocks south of city hall—the Lincolnville neighborhood. Signs throughout the neighborhood mark the St. Augustine Freedom Trail, houses and churches where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gathered with other activists during the American civil rights movement. Jenny spoke with a mother and adult daughter here. One of them has asthma. They had to relocate to an apartment off of US 1, a busy highway. The mother’s uncle had built the house himself and given it to them. But money was tight, and repairs seemed daunting. Jenny also met a Black grandmother sorting through her belongings inside a dark bungalow with a screened-in porch. The house was raised up about a foot above the ground on columns called piers, but it had still filled with water. Books, clothing, photographs were stacked on the floor, drying. I just remember feeling her sense of bewilderment.
In the months that followed, Jenny and her colleagues had to review dozens of applications seeking permission to either demolish or gut buildings in the historic district—erasing architectural details that form the city’s story, little chapters and subplots vanishing. Dozens of homeowners filed requests with the city to raise their foundations on high piers; each had to be carefully reviewed so that the modifications wouldn’t distort the aesthetic or legacy of St. Augustine. (One of the conundrums of historic preservation is how much to modify a building or property—even if in the interest of protecting it from disaster—before it loses the very qualities the make it historic.)
In May 2017, as the community was still taking stock of the damages, the state and NOAA released a second report on flooding and sea level rise in St. Augustine with more detailed recommendations. This report suggested infrastructure improvements such as upgrading the stormwater drainage system. It also offered up several warnings. “St. Augustine’s historic districts are vulnerable, immovable, and irreplaceable,” it read. Neither FEMA’s policies on building elevations nor state guidelines for road and bridge designs had realistically taken rising seas into account, even after the city’s experience with Matthew and “dire sea level rise predictions.” Moreover, “many residents seem not to know what’s coming.”
Then in September 2017, a little less than a year after Matthew, Hurricane Irma arrived in the city. Irma was a Category 4 when it struck the Bahamas and Category 5 when it made landfall in Cuba, then weakened when it reached Florida. Like Matthew, the storm gave St. Augustine a serious dousing. The surge of water gushed into some of the same houses and buildings that had only just been repaired. Like Matthew, it turned people’s belongings into debris and scattered them across the street. In the days afterward, hotels put mattresses out on the pavement to dry.
The city was more prepared this time. We knew what to do to help us plan in advance, Jenny said afterward. At the Ponce, after Leslee suggested and urged the idea, Flagler College put up door dams, barriers at the bases of doorways that help keep water out, and various property owners around town applied tape and caulk and other barriers to make their houses and buildings as watertight as possible.
Still, this second storm dealt a gut punch to some property owners who were just beginning to recover. And the picture it painted—of a life marked by flood after flood—looked disturbing.
In late October 2017, about seven weeks after Irma, Leslee Keys traveled to Maryland. Some of her colleagues elsewhere—preservationists in communities all along the coasts—had decided to expand the conversation about sea level rise, old cities, and saving history. In 2016, a group in Newport, Rhode Island, had organized an unusual conference called Keeping History Above Water. Lisa Craig, then still the Annapolis chief of historic preservation, had proposed turning it into a regular event and convened a second such gathering in 2017 in Annapolis. There they discussed solutions ranging from the conventional to the fanciful: from raising building foundations higher to designs for retrofitting historic buildings with “amphibious” foundations that would float on the water’s surface when floods arrive.
Leslee’s presentation, which she delivered on Halloween with colleagues from Stetson University and the University of Florida, was sobering. They called it “Preserving Paradise.” Slide after slide of flooded streets, and an even more disturbing estimate of the damages: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts sea levels will rise as much as three feet in Miami by 2060, read one of the slides. By the end of the century, according to projections by Zillow, some 934,000 existing Florida properties, worth more than $400 billion, are at risk of being submerged. Her last slide was an image from Planet of the Apes: the Statue of Liberty sunk in sand.
Immediately thereafter, Leslee began organizing this same conference—to bring throngs of engineers, coastal scientists, historic preservationists, archaeologists, even the military to St. Augustine. Maybe a couple hundred minds could figure out how to protect this place.
When I called Leslee for the first time in the fall of 2018, she offered me a small lament. “I knew when I was twenty that I loved old buildings and I wanted to save them. And I wanted to use them to teach people about our history and appreciate them. So for basically forty years, I have been doing that. And I have saved statues and archaeological sites, and you know, it’s a wonderful experience,” she said. “I hate to think that everything—this sounds very conceited…” She paused; she was more used to understating her own work. “I hate to think that everything that I have done for the last forty years is now going to be gone because sea level rise has not been addressed. So it’s very personal.”
She invited me to visit St. Augustine the following year in May for the conference. She told me that it wouldn’t be too hot yet or too crowded with tourists and that it would be mint julep season. She knew how to talk about disasters—and how to throw a party.