"The Sea Came and Took it all Away..."

Palomino (by Pieter Bas Elskamp CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).
Palomino (by Pieter Bas Elskamp CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

The Colombian beach resort facing a ‘public calamity’

– the Guardian

Excerpt:
In the past 10 years, Palomino’s coastline has receded between 47 and 50 metres, threatening the livelihoods of restaurateurs, hoteliers and all those who work in the resort

One night in February, Antonio Villamizar was woken up suddenly in the small hours by a phone call. “Hurry up, your restaurant is being swept away,” he was warned. He jumped out of bed and rushed with his sons to his beachfront restaurant, only to find that it had gone.

The rising seas had destroyed the two-storey wooden building, dragging plastic chairs and tables out to sea, bringing down walls and ruining the kitchen.

“The sea came in and took it all away. I lost it completely,” says Villamizar, known as Toño. “It made you want to cry.”

Despite the frustration, it came as no surprise to Villamizar. In the 12 years of owning his restaurant on Palomino beach in the Guajira region on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, he has had to rebuild and move it 10 times because of rising sea levels and coastal erosion.

Since last December alone, he has had to relocate four times; his rebuilt restaurant sits on an estuary where the Palomino River meets the Caribbean Sea. In recent years, two fellow restaurateurs have been forced to close due to damage caused by the erosion.

“We are losing the beach very, very quickly. We are scared of rebuilding; it’s worrisome to lose money again,” Villamizar says, standing among his restaurant’s red plastic tables crowded with customers. “But we must keep rebuilding and finding new ways to keep fighting, as much as the sea will let us, because this is our livelihood…”

Hurricane Milton’s Clear, Breathtaking Eye, October 8, 2024 (Imagery from GEO-KOMPSAT satellite, Courtesy of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University, the Korea Meteorological Administration, and the National Meteorological Satellite Center).
Hurricane Milton’s Clear, Breathtaking Eye, October 8, 2024 (Imagery from GEO-KOMPSAT satellite, Courtesy of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University, the Korea Meteorological Administration, and the National Meteorological Satellite Center).

Excerpt:
A rapid analysis of rainfall trends and Gulf of Mexico temperatures shows many similarities to Hurricane Helene less than two weeks earlier.

A preliminary analysis from the team of scientists at World Weather Attribution indicates the rainfall from Hurricane Milton across Florida was 20 percent to 30 percent heavier and rainfall intensity was about twice as likely as it would have been in the climate of the late 19th century.

Similarly, climate change is responsible for a 40 percent increase in the intensity of storms like Milton, located in the eastern Gulf of Mexico near the Florida coast, the analysis found. Effectively, Milton would have made landfall as a Category 2 storm in an earlier climate. Instead, it came onshore Wednesday night near Siesta Key south of Sarasota as a Category 3.

Like Hurricane Helene 12 days earlier, Milton met the scientific criteria for rapid intensification—an increase in maximum wind speed of 35 miles per hour in 24 hours. But Milton intensified at a truly staggering rate while over the southern Gulf of Mexico, 95 miles per hour in 24 hours. Only two other storms—Wilma (2005) and Felix (2007)—intensified faster in the Atlantic basin, the area that includes the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and open Atlantic Ocean.

This extreme rapid intensification is projected to happen more often in today’s modern, warming climate…

Beaches | Coasts of the Month . . .

Photos of the Month . . .

Local village boys using found planks of wood to surf in Madagascar. They were shredding © 2024 Oleg Guerrand-Hermes.
Local village boys using found planks of wood to surf in Madagascar. They were shredding © 2024 Oleg Guerrand-Hermes.

“The arts was and continues to be a magnet for my mind and soul, and it was so obvious to me that life without the arts would just be flat,”Oleg Guerrand-Hermès

 Cultured (10-27-2023)

Question its future

Excerpt:
Two back-to-back destructive storms make some ponder the burden of the barrier island’s beauty. Will they rebuild again or give in to climate change?

Trudging back to his flooded home for the second time in as many weeks, dragging a rolling trash can loaded with a generator and other supplies through sand-mired streets, Jason Bain surveyed the remains of his family’s coastal oasis.

Doors and roofs had been ripped off homes and the quaint blue-and-white Gulf Surf Motor Inn, which like other buildings on the key was now buried in sand, its “No Vacancy” sign rendered obsolete. Back-to-back hurricanes had ripped the door, roof and wall off a neighbor’s house, filling it with sand and tossing their sedan against the garage door.

Dozens of piles of soggy furniture and other debris, coated in sand this week by Hurricane Milton, marked the homes that had flooded last month during Hurricane Helene. Most of those were older, single-story homes on the gulf side, but there was debris outside the Spanish-tiled villas on the other side of the road, too. Earth movers struggled to reconstruct a temporary road installed after Helene.

Massive pines, palms and other tropical trees that made up the key’s lush canopy had toppled in high winds. Underground power lines poked from the sand.

“We had just put everything back together,” he said. But now, “the island is unrecognizable…”

Read Full Article …

CURRENT NEWS + RECENT POSTS

More Posts . . .