The Prospect Lake Gamble
Fort Lauderdale's Billion-Dollar Bet on Drinking Water

About this book:

Beneath the yacht-lined canals and glittering high-rises of the "Venice of America," a silent crisis has been rising for decades. Fort Lauderdale’s lifeblood—the Biscayne Aquifer—is losing a war against saltwater intrusion, aging pipes, and a treatment plant held together by duct tape and luck. *The Prospect Lake Gamble* pulls back the curtain on the city’s desperate, billion-dollar roll of the dice: replacing the crumbling Fiveash plant with a cutting-edge facility capable of holding back the rising sea. From the backrooms of City Hall where public-private partnerships are forged and broken, to the trenches where crews battle crumbling mains and shifting hydrology, this is the definitive account of a municipality staring down the barrel of catastrophic failure—and choosing to engineer its own survival.

This is more than a local infrastructure saga; it is a harbinger for every coastal city on the planet. With a price tag soaring past $666 million, the Prospect Lake Clean Water Center represents the most complex municipal water overhaul in Florida history, a high-stakes collision of nanofiltration science, capital market volatility, and the brutal politics of rate hikes. Authoritative yet gripping, the narrative navigates the "Ghosts of Fiveash," the supply chain nightmares of a pandemic era, and the looming specter of "forever chemicals," revealing how climate adaptation actually happens when the theoretical meets the contractual.

Ultimately, *The Prospect Lake Gamble* is a story about the true cost of the tap. It exposes the fragile bargain struck between human ambition and geologic reality in a region living on borrowed time. For urban planners, policymakers, and anyone who turns on a faucet without a second thought, Fort Lauderdale’s ordeal offers an unvarnished, urgently necessary playbook: a testament to the political courage, engineering audacity, and sheer financial grit required to secure clean water at the edge of a rising ocean.