MIAMI — On a bayfront street in Miami Shores, water bubbled up from the asphalt. It surged up through a drain, covering the entire street in just a few hours despite a perfectly clear sky.

Saturday marked the peak of this season’s king tide, the highest tide of the year. Across South Florida, and along the east coast, salty water crept into streets and yards, offering a glimpse of a near future with a higher sea level.

Rigobert Merisier’s usual parking spot — above a street drain — was covered with a few inches of water when he returned to the grocery store Saturday morning. He maneuvered his car to the middle of the street, where his daughter could grab the groceries from the front seat without getting her feet wet.

For the seven years Merisier has lived here, the water has been a problem. Floodwaters ruined his car, a Mazda, three years ago. Fresh sod, just three days old, sits on his front lawn to replace the grass that died under a deluge of saltwater earlier this summer.

And last year, the floodwaters found their way inside his Miami Shores home, up through his toilet and shower after his septic tank backed up due to the rising tide.

“We called the city for help. They brought pumps to the end of the street but....” he said, shrugging. At the end of the block, two temporary stormwater pumps hum with the effort of moving the saltwater on the street back into Biscayne Bay.

Merisier said he’s fed up with the flooding and the rising cost of living in his neighborhood. A condemned home at the end of the block, closer to the water, is for sale for more than $2 million.

“We’re looking to get out of Miami altogether,” he said.

His neighbor, Nicole Dorsonne, has lived on this street for 30 years. She’d like to leave, too, but her husband wants to stay. She said the flooding has gotten worse since she first moved to Miami Shores, and she’s tired of parking at the end of the street and wading back home.

“You need boots to live here, or a boat,” she joked.

How high is the water?

A dozen miles south, at Florida International University’s outpost at the Kampong botanical garden in Coconut Grove, the room was packed with scientists and volunteers charged with documenting this king tide.

Brenna Kays, a post-doctoral student at FIU studying adaptation to climate change, led the room through a quick lesson in how to use all the devices they were handed. First was a tape measure to check the depth of the floodwater. The tape measure was rusted, a nod to the nine years this program, called FIU’s Sea Level Solutions Day, has been ongoing.

Volunteers were also handed bottles, to scoop up some of the water, and refractometers, devices that helped measure the saltiness of the floodwaters. In their pack, they got a vial with a screw-on cap, to capture a small sample of water and test for E. Coli, a sign that the waters could be contaminated by sewage.

That piqued the interest of Lucero Omana and Mariam Medina, a pair of environmental engineering students at FIU particularly concerned with how sea level rise is expected to break thousands of Miami’s septic systems, spreading human waste into the streets and Biscayne Bay.

Medina, 26, said she wanted to get involved in the annual event to be a part of the solution. By documenting the extent and danger of the rising waters, planners can better understand what fixes are needed.

“If you don’t know what is happening you can’t stop it,” she said.

That’s exactly what event organizers like Kays want to hear. They believe in the power of citizen science, not only for increasing the sheer number of sites the team can survey in one single day during one high tide, but in getting people involved in the conversation about how sea level rise will change their community.

This year’s king tides were expected to be about 2 feet above high tide. South Florida could see that amount of sea level rise, permanently, by 2060, projections show.

“There’s conversations now about living with water. What does that look like? How do we adapt our cities and our people to be comfortable?” Kays said.

“If this is just the beginning, what is it going to look like in the future?”

‘An inconvenience’

Gene Drody has lived in Miami Shores since 1947. The 80-year-old retiree said he couldn’t imagine a better place to live, minus the flooding.

It’s not all that bad yet, he said. Just “an inconvenience” for his home, which is on a slight rise, despite backing up to a canal. On high-tide days or during bad rainstorms, the street floods. It only got into his garage one time, and it was just a few inches.

On Saturday, three temporary stormwater pumps dotted the canal-front street, ferrying the water pooling out from various street drains back into the canal.

“When the canal is higher than the pipe — you do the math,” he said.

Drody said Miami Shores has surveyed his neighborhood multiple times ahead of a big drainage project, an overhaul that could fix some of the problems plaguing the low-lying street. But so far, there’s been no shovels in the ground to get going on a fix.

In the meantime, he said, some neighbors on the street are seeing floodwaters creeping through their yards and closer to their front doors. And their septic systems are acting up as the previously-dry dirt they drained into gets soggier and soggier.

“I’m a naysayer about all that climate change stuff, but the tide is higher,” he said. “It’s been a problem for 30 years, but it’s getting worse because of the sea level rise.”

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