Egmont Key, Ground Zero for Sea Level Rise in Florida, Is a Preview for Coastal Communities

Flagler County and its cities are debating whether and how to manage the county’s 18 miles of beaches, whether and how to rebuild and maintain them in the face of unstoppable sea level rise and now-routine, severe erosion. See background articles and documents at the foot of this article, which provides an analytcal illustration of the future of barrier island communities like Flagler Beach. 

By Ben Montgomery

In January 1898, a group of local visionaries and businessmen escorted 17 visiting Congressmen with their wives and daughters aboard the magnificent steamer Olivette on an excursion 30 miles out to beautiful Egmont Key, a 500-acre island in the mouth of Tampa Bay.

The lawmakers, all members of the House Committee on Rivers and Harbors, ate sandwiches and imbibed on “product” from nearby Florida Brewing, according to The Morning Tribune. As they rounded the alluring key in Gilded Age pomp, they would’ve seen the island’s plentiful housing, troops barracks and the new Gulf of Mexico-facing Fort Dade fortifications, which were built to withstand intense hurricanes and which many believed could protect Tampa Bay from the world’s fiercest navies.

When the Olivette stopped near the northern channel with the 86-foot-tall Egmont Key lighthouse at their backs, the local capitalists – with names like Plant, Sparkman and Macfarlane – spread out maps of the shallow 400-square-mile bay before them. They were joined by harbor pilots, captains who lived on Egmont Key and knew the bay bottoms better than anyone. The pilots “pointed out where the shoals were located and exactly what is needed to give a depth of water sufficient to accommodate the vessels that would come to Port Tampa.”

The city fathers began to convince their powerful visitors of the need to dredge shipping lanes and establish a commercial trading port at Tampa, a young Florida city which boasted a population of around 15,000 people.

Over the next 127 years, Port Tampa Bay would grow to be the largest and most diversified in Florida, supporting more than 192,000 jobs, with an economic impact of $34.6 billion. At the same time, millions of humans moved an enormous amount of wealth and resources onto the coastal wetlands around Tampa Bay – hospitals, airports, high-rise hotels, sports stadiums, banks, data centers, U.S. Central Command – calling it progress and maybe it was, but it was accompanied by haunting risk.

The little island held lessons for those men in 1898, had they looked.

The lighthouse behind them was the island’s second; the first had been clobbered by a hurricane a few months after it was built in 1848, then split by lightning. The tower’s placement, more than 100 feet from the keeper’s residence in case it toppled, was an early example of a building code long before the state standardized them in 1974. And the island itself was shrinking.

Egmont Key is a bellwether, an observable Ground Zero for local sea level rise, our canary in the climate-change coal mine. The island you see today from the top of the Sunshine Skyway bridge is smaller than the island you saw last year. The island you see today is 300 acres smaller than it was in 1898.

In September, Hurricane Helene pushed seawater over Egmont Key. It left a line 15 feet high on that lighthouse wall, killed acres of fauna, trashed the docks, and flooded the small cluster of remaining houses to the doorknobs. Then Hurricane Milton two weeks later blew the mess apart and drove the last of the harbor pilots, who have occupied the island for 150 years, to the mainland.

If we’re charting the epic of climate change and looking for a distinct place and a specific time to note the beginning of what will be a long and painful retreat, mark it down: Egmont Key, 2024.

A bunch of structures close to the seashore

Early Floridians moved with the water line.

We know this thanks to a 2012 discovery in North Florida. In a sinkhole in the Aucilla River, south of Tallahassee, divers found a man-made knife that carbon-dated to 14,500 years ago, the earliest sign of man in the southeastern United States, at a time when the land would have met the sea about 100 miles farther out from where it is today. The sinkhole in the Aucilla would have been a high-savannah watering hole and place to butcher mastodons.

What’s interesting, according to journalist Jeff Goodell in “The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World,” is that the date corresponds to the disintegration of the ice sheets at the end of the last ice age – an event scientists call Meltwater Pulse 1A, when the oceans rose about a foot every decade for 350 years.

Scientists don’t know what rapidly melted the ice caps and caused the rapid rise, but in flat Florida, the water would have moved inland fast – about 500 to 600 feet per year, or a mile of coastline per decade. The humans who abandoned the watering hole might’ve even seen it encroaching if they sat there long enough.

The difference now, of course, is that modern man has built a bunch of structures close to the seashore and filled those structures with goods. And there are a lot more of us so we’ve established laws regarding the rights to the goods and structures, and to the land under it, and we thought up ways to mitigate act-of-god losses communally with insurance, with little regard for the lawless, ever-encroaching water.

So we put off the retreat as long as we can. We strengthen seawalls and pump sand to build up barrier islands. We’ve done this for decades on the coasts. But at some point, if the sea keeps rising, it’s no longer feasible to expect those protections to work.

This is the harbor pilots’ predicament since this summer’s storms.

An eerie backwater

Capt. John Timmel moved to the key in 1989, when his son, Jack, was a toddler. John is retired, and Jack is Captain Jack now, president of the Tampa Bay Pilot Association, and technically the island’s last resident. He and his wife Monica have relocated to Davis Island full time.

John and Jack and their wives led an excursion to the shuttered island on a recent Friday morning to board up broken windows and salvage keepsakes. They shuttled a team from the University of South Florida, which has been documenting Egmont Key’s history for five years, working on a book and a virtual reality history tour before it’s too late.

There used to be 18 homes on the Egmont Key, but most of them are in pieces now, or have floated far from their foundations.

“When we came out here after Helene, you couldn’t see through to the other side,” said Monica, Jack’s wife. Now you can stand in the pilot’s village on the east and look west through scorched sabal palms to the cobalt rise of the Gulf.

The island feels a little like an eerie backwater outpost lately. Two big bald eagles fly menacing patrols around an enormous nest high in a cedar tree. Someone has used driftwood and beach scrap to build primitive forts around the island.

On the east side, a crash-test dummy sits upright in a lounge chair, a mandolin on his lap and his head resting on an embroidered throw pillow that says “IT’S 5 O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE.”

For several years, the pilots have been expecting a storm to dislodge them. Their resiliency plan – to relocate operations to a spot under the Sunshine Skyway – has been expedited. They’re temporarily operating out of a mariana at Tierra Verde, in Pinellas County.

There were 18 pilot homes on Egmont – all owned by the association and assigned to specific pilots. All were badly damaged if not destroyed. Until the storms, when the weather was right, Jack and Monica stayed on the island four or five nights a week. They loved the spotty cell service and laid-back lifestyle. They loved the keepsake turtle shells and rattlesnake skins and triple bunk beds in their assigned cottage, built in the 1890s. Friends who visited signed their names and we-had-such-a-nice-times in a guest book and watched “Titanic” on VHS. Monica pictured her naked babies playing on the beach.

The house is solid wood – no sheetrock or insulation to grow mold. It could be rehabbed and livable with some work. John and Jack think maybe it could next be a museum, or a home for a Florida Fish and Wildlife officer, but so much is up in the air.

The island has a purposefully complicated ownership structure to stymie development. But in 1928, Hillsborough County purchased some land on the east side and leased that land to the Tampa Bay Pilots Association. The lease was for 100 years.

That lease is up in three years, so the pilots must now decide whether it’s worth renewing for another century. Will this island be here in 2125? That’s partly why the USF team came out, to continue to scan the land and structures to preserve digitally what is now disappearing.

“We need to scramble to figure out what the future looks like,” Capt. Jack Timmel said. “The pilots have been out here for over 150 years, and if this is the end of that – and we don’t know that yet – but if this is the end of that, all the scans are going to be valuable in telling that story in the future.”

‘Hurricanes are going to happen’

“At some point,” said Rita Youngman, “nature is going to win.”

The Seminole singer-songwriter grew up in South Florida –  Rita now lives in Lake Placid, in south central Florida  –  and didn’t know anything about Egmont Key until the early 2000s, when the Army Corps of Engineers told the Seminole Tribe of Florida the island was washing away and asked whether it should be renourished with sand pumped from the sea floor onto the beaches during a dredging project.

The Seminoles, unaware of their full history on the island, started exploring and, according to Egmont Key: A Seminole History, published by the Seminole Tribe, learned the key had been used as a stockade for captured Seminoles in the 1850s, until they could be relocated west with the Trail of Tears.

The relocation, at the end of the U.S. Army’s third Seminole War, gave the Seminoles the story of Polly Parker, who escaped captivity in St. Marks and walked by moonlight all the way back to Fish Eating Creek on Lake Okeechobee, where she set about repopulating the decimated tribe, which remains proudly unconquered, according to the Seminole Tribe. The tribe encouraged the Corps to proceed with the renourishment and it did, in 2014 and 2015, pumping 676,000 cubic yards of sand on the island. The sand created 39 acres of new shoreline for nesting turtles, then quickly washed away.

A fire in 2016 burned away a thick blanket of detritus and gave Seminole historians a chance to explore the key for mass burials using ground penetrating, the Seminole history says, and they found artifacts dating back to the time Seminoles were imprisoned, but no graves.

Youngman was moved to write a song, titled “Egmont Key,” about the voices of her ancestors calling out from the dunes on Egmont Key, but she doesn’t believe the island should be saved. “The earth is alive, especially here in Florida,” she said. “Hurricanes are going to happen. Fires are going to happen. If the ocean wants to reclaim this island – if the ocean wants to reclaim Florida – it’s going to happen, I don’t care how much money you spend on it.”

Stuck waiting

We continue to try to “save” Egmont Key. In fact, the Corps has plans to pump up to 5 million cubic yards of bottom sand onto the key as part of a project to deepen the shipping channels in 2027, much more than previous dredges.

Rather than renourishing the north end, which tends to wash into the channel, the plan calls for spreading the sand at the center of the island and returning it to its 1950s dimensions, with upland habitat and vegetated dunes.

Patrick Mundus says it can’t happen soon enough. “That’s probably the only thing that will keep the island from splitting in half,” he said. Mundus monitors the island as a board member with Friends of the Tampa Bay National Wildlife Refuges and has noticed a long valley forming in the middle, near the pilot’s village. “It’s amazing how fast it’s going,” says the man who has watched the topography change over five or six years.

And the deterioration is likely to speed up, even with supplemental sand. Average sea-level rise in nearby St. Petersburg is 7.8 inches since 1970 and scientists say it’s increasing quickly. Most climate models predict another 5 to 8 inches in the next 25 years.

That’s just sea-level rise. Climate experts expect hurricanes to increase in intensity and frequency as the planet warms. In “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” David Wallace-Wells reports that the ensuing devastation will feel something like extended nuclear war.

Hard to imagine? Think of the tens of thousands of residents of the Pinellas County barrier islands and Hillsborough’s lowlands who are stuck waiting on insurance checks, or inspections, or permits, while teetering on the brink of financial ruin.

James Adair, a South Tampa realtor, said FEMA’s 50-percent rule – if repair costs exceed 50 percent, a homeowner must fully comply with new flood codes to get an insurance payout – will make coastal living a luxury in an area long-known for affordability. “The storm didn’t discriminate, but those with money recover faster,” he said.

Most post-storm sales he’s seen so far are longtime homeowners who have no mortgage or flood insurance and they sell quickly for cash. He expects the next wave of sales to be folks who have mortgages and are waiting on insurance claims.

“With delays in payments, many are stuck in limbo, unsure whether to rebuild or sell,” Adair said. “Residents want to save their homes, but for many, the reality of storms and rebuilding is forcing tough choices.”

Only a matter of time

Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli calls this “forced retreat,” when a chunk of the population has no choice but to bail. He says it’s already changing the demographics in places like St. Pete Beach, Madeira Beach and Indian Rocks Beach.

“What’s happening is we’re being gentrified,” said Berardelli, WFLA News Channel 8’s chief meteorologist and climate specialist. More and more, the only people who can live on the islands are those who can afford the exposure, he said. “That’s happening in front of our eyes. And every storm is going to take another chunk of people out.”

Add this to the equation: new studies suggest Florida experienced a lull in hurricanes between the 1960s and 1990s because industrial pollution actually kept the North Atlantic cooler for several decades, masking the century-scale greenhouse-gas warming contributions to North Atlantic major hurricane frequency.

The next one is only a matter of time. Berardelli saw the future in a study he did recently using fresh data from the Department of Energy. His research found that Florida residents can expect three times the number of intense hurricanes to make landfall. “Instead of one major storm every 100 years, we’ll get one every 30 years,” he said. “It changes the whole game.”

He reported this to viewers a few weeks before Hurricane Helene.

“There are a lot of people second guessing living here,” he said. “In this day and age, when there’s so much noise, sometimes first-hard experiences are the only way for people to take things seriously.”

In the early 1900s, a few years after the lawmakers visited, some 300 members of the military were stationed on Egmont Key.

There were 70 buildings: spacious bungalows, a general store, power plant, movie theater, tennis courts, and even a bowling alley. Little of that remains. In 2017, the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation listed Egmont as one of the most threatened historic properties in Florida due to erosion.

Dr. Brook Hansen, a University of South Florida anthropologist specializing in cultural heritage at risk, and Dr. Laura Harrison, an archaeologist and director of USF’s Access 3D Lab, have been 3D scanning the remaining structures on the island – the lighthouse, the cemetery with 19 crosses, and the Mellon Battery – to preserve the key in a book and in digital form before it’s too late.

If the island fully disappears, they told me, we can still visit inside virtual reality goggles.