Even small storms can bea challenge in S. Fla.
Even smaller storms can cause problems
Seventy years ago, back-to-back hurricanes dumped enough rain to make South Florida look as if it had slipped into the sea.
Waves washed across Las Olas Boulevard. Mannequins floated inside a flooded department store. Rising waters marooned hundreds of cars and turned highways into rivers. Cattle that roamed western farmland sought refuge atop levees.
The scenes from the Great South Florida Flood of 1947 resemble the images from Houston, where Hurricane Harvey pummeled Texas with a record-breaking rain in excess of 50 inches in some places.
Could South Florida’s epic flood be repeated if a Hurricane Harveylike storm hit here? Experts say South Florida’s drainage system built in the wake of the 1947 flood would likely be better equipped than Houston’s to handle such staggering rainfall totals, but it would still inflict catastrophic damage on the region.
“The bottom line is if South Florida got the kind of rain Houston got it would be overwhelmed,” said Thomas MacVicar, a water management consultant with decades of experience in South Florida. “The system was not designed for 50 inches in a week. No system is designed for that.”
Fort Lauderdale’s average annual rainfall for the entire year
South Florida’s deluge in 1947 spurred the construction of more than 2,000 miles of canals and levees and led to the creation of a floodcontrol agency that eventually became the South Florida Water Management District. A government newsreel from the time called those public works projects the greatest excavation of dirt since the digging of the Panama Canal.
Though South Florida hardened its flood defenses in the 1950s and ’60s, it also made some of the same mistakes that contributed to flooding in Houston, developing in floodprone areas and paving open land that would otherwise help absorb is 62 inches.