Please bear with me. So far, this is what I have confirmed through my review of Village records and other investigations of :
1. The Village has 39 gravity wells that are part of its existing infrastructure system.
2. Of the 39, 12 were cleaned and maintained from 2022-2023. None have yet been cleaned this year.
3. Most, if not all, of the Village’s outfalls have been cleaned within the past 2-3 years.
Even with less than one-third of the wells having been adequately maintained, we are not presently flooding for more than a couple of hours—even during torrential rain events as we had in May and June when South Florida suffered what was referred to by the “storm people” as a 200-year storm. Maybe we didn’t suffer as severely as the rest of Miami-Dade, but it rained hard here, too.
If we cleaned out the other two-thirds of our gravity wells, we would be in even better shape when the heavy rain comes.
I submit that we video our entire stormwater infrastructure so we have a good idea of where our system is today.
Based on the video project’s results, we can decide whether to finish cleaning and maintaining what we now have. Then, we can observe it for a prudent amount of time to determine whether our system has reached the end of its “useful life” – as our Chief Resilience Officer contends – or if it can continue to service our community for years to come.
If we perform maintenance on our system, it could serve us for many more years.
With all due respect to those in charge, we should have done this on day one of hiring a CRO and before concluding that we needed to abandon what we had for a new $700-million system.
You must understand that installing a new stormwater system does not resolve the deleterious effects of “sea level rise.”
We will never be able to pump out the groundwater once it is over the grates of catch basins. We will have to raise the elevation of our lots and streets.
Luis “Lucho” de la Cruz
de la Cruz is a former Key Biscayne Councilmember