On Key Largo, to walk to Paul Butler’s house it’s best to wear rubber boots. “Did you see the ‘No Wake’ sign?” he asks. The recently installed “No Wake” signs are for drivers, not boaters.

There are several inches of water on his street and others in this low-lying neighborhood. Butler has lived here 25 years and seen this kind of flooding before.

“It used to happen once a year during king tide, but it would only last for like a week or 10 days,” he says. “This year, it’s been going on for about 75 days, I think.” Other neighbors put it at 80 days and counting.

The flooding here and elsewhere is happening during so-called “king tides.” Those are times, mostly in the fall, when the moon’s gravitational pull means tides are higher than usual.

On Key Largo, the water doesn’t drain, because there’s nowhere for it to go. Brian Boylan says his flooded street is basically even with the bay, and during king tide the seawater overtops the canal in his backyard. “You can see it coming right out of the ground,” he says. “Sometimes you can even see it bubbling.”

Needless to say, Boylan and other neighbors aren’t happy that they’re now surrounded by water. The biggest problem? “Just driving through it,” he says. “You’re ruining your vehicles. My truck’s all rusty underneath.” Saltwater is corrosive. He says, “We wash it off, but you can’t get it. The brakes will probably go.”

Making things worse, the neighborhood was built on fill and residents can point to areas where the ground has settled. But another factor is the rising sea level.

“Obviously … it’s gone up, because I can tell from my dock,” says Boylan, who built his house and dock 40 years ago. He says the water at the dock now is 6 inches higher than it used to be.

Not far away, on Virginia Key, scientists are also charting the rising sea level. Brian McNoldy is with the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. He’s been monitoring a tidal gauge; for five months running, the average has broken tide records, he says.

“Right now, we’re running about 8 to 9 inches above them,” McNoldy says. “But there have been times in recent weeks when we’ve been up to 18 inches. And that definitely is impactful.”

Increased flooding from high tides is a problem not just in Florida, but also in other low-lying coastal communities around the U.S. Boston, Charleston and Norfolk are just three cities that have seen flooding this year during exceptionally high king tides.

William Sweet, an oceanographer with NOAA, released a report earlier this year warning of the increasing threat of high-tide flooding. He says unfortunately, the predictions are already coming true.

“Sea level rise, decades’ worth of it has caught up,” Sweet says. “These sort of garden variety events, you know, seasonal high tides, winds blowing offshore that used to not be a problem?” Now, he says, they are a problem, causing flooding in an increasing number of coastal areas.

Although it’s a global issue, for now it’s local governments that are faced with the challenge of addressing high-tide flooding.

In Monroe County, home to the Florida Keys, local officials are hoping to get $150 million in federal funds, money allocated to help the area rebuild stronger after 2017’s Hurricane Irma. Monroe County wants to use it to raise roads and buildings and improve drainage.

One of the projects would be in Paul Butler’s long-flooded Key Largo neighborhood, but that will take years. In the meantime, he says, residents are being forced to make their own adjustments.

“It’s kind of tough to go out and walk your dog unless you have hip boots on,” he says. “There [are] people that are going to work that won’t drive their vehicles through here. And they park up to the grocery store on U.S. 1 and they’ll walk up.”

If history is any guide, Butler says, flooding here should subside soon, at least until the next king tide.

One thing all parties in the impeachment saga can agree on: $391 million in security assistance earmarked for Ukraine was withheld this past summer by the Trump White House and released on Sept. 11.

There’s far less consensus, though, about just when that hold began. It’s a key question, since that date may prove crucial for establishing whether the aid freeze violated the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, or ICA.

The Democratic-led House budget and appropriations committees have expressed “serious concerns that President Trump and his administration violated the ICA in withholding these funds.” The committees have put the Trump administration on notice that they “are examining when, why, and how these funds were withheld; and whether these actions prevented agencies from spending the full amount that Congress provided for these activities, thus thwarting the will of Congress.”

Here’s a timeline of what’s been learned about the timing of the Ukraine aid hold. It’s based on testimony heard during the two weeks of the House intelligence committee’s public impeachment hearings, as well as from transcripts that have been released of closed door depositions:

June 18, 2019: The Pentagon announces plans “to provide $250 million to Ukraine in security cooperation funds for additional training, equipment and advisory efforts to build the capacity of Ukraine’s armed forces.”

June 19: President Trump starts asking about the Ukraine military assistance, according to Mark Sandy, a career official in the Office of Management and Budget. Sandy told House investigators he learned of Trump’s queries in an e-mail from Mike Duffey, a political appointee who oversees funding for military, intelligence and international affairs at OMB. This was the same day a report about the Pentagon’s announced Ukraine assistance appeared in the Washington Examiner, a conservative website and weekly tabloid.

July 3: This is the earliest publicly known date when a hold on the Ukraine assistance appears to have been imposed. “On July 3, I learned,” Jennifer Williams, a Russia adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, told the House Intelligence panel, “that the Office of Management and Budget had placed a hold on a tranche of security assistance designated for Ukraine.”

July 12: Further evidence of a hold on the Ukraine aid is found in an email that OMB’s Sandy received on this date from Robert Blair, a senior adviser to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. Asked at a closed door deposition what was said in that email, Sandy replied, “to the best of my recollection, that the president is directing a hold on military support funding for Ukraine.”

July 18: The hold becomes more widely known within the Trump administration. State Department Ukraine expert Catherine Croft, who’d been detailed to the National Security Council, told a public hearing of the impeachment inquiry that on this date, “I participated in a sub-Policy Coordination Committee video conference where an OMB representative reported that the White House Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, had placed an informal hold on security assistance to Ukraine. The only reason given was that the order came at the direction of the President.”

July 19: The Department of Defense has been notified of the hold, according to OMB’s Sandy, who told House investigators he was informed of this by OMB political appointee Mike Duffey. Sandy said he asked Duffey what the duration of the hold would be “and was told there was not clear guidance on that.” He also expressed concern to Duffey about the freeze on funds possibly violating the Impoundment Control Act, since it could lead to the expiration of those funds.

July 25: OMB’s Sandy signs the first document making the hold official and valid through Aug. 5. This is the same day Trump called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and asked for “a favor”: that Zelenskiy would probe Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s activities in Ukraine — as well as a debunked claim that Ukraine, not Russia, had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computer server.

Hours after that phone call takes place, the State Department receives two emails from Ukraine’s embassy in Washington. That’s according to Laura Cooper, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. “One was received on July 25, at 2:31 p.m. That email said that the Ukrainian embassy and House foreign affairs committee are asking about security assistance,” Cooper told the House intelligence committee. “The second email was received July 25 at 4:25 p.m. That email said the Hill knows about the [Foreign Military Financing] situation to an extent and so does the Ukrainian embassy.”

July 30: OMB’s Sandy is informed he will no longer be approving the holds on Ukraine assistance. Instead, he tells House investigators, political appointee Mike Duffey would sign off on such documents. “He had an interest in being more involved in daily operations,” says Duffey, “and he regarded this responsibility as a way for him to learn more about the specific accounts in his area.”

Mid-August to early September: Duffey signs “at least half a dozen” additional temporary holds on the Ukraine assistance, according to Sandy.

August 28: Politico scoops a previously unreported story: that the Trump administration is “slow-walking $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine.”

Sept. 11: The hold is lifted on the Ukraine assistance, 85 days after the Pentagon announced that aid had become available. That leaves only 19 days to obligate that funding.

Sept. 30: End of the fiscal year. According to OMB’s Sandy, $35 million in funds do not get spent in time to meet the deadline. Congress includes that same amount in a continuing resolution to ensure the aid reaches Ukraine.

“Shocking and unprecedented,” that’s how ousted Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer describes President Trump’s intervention in the Navy SEALs Trident scandal. Spencer was fired this week over the controversy.

He made his comments Wednesday in an op-ed published in the Washington Post. Spencer says Trump called him twice over the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher. Gallagher was charged with multiple crimes including killing a wounded ISIS fighter but was convicted only of a lesser offense of posing with the corpse of that captive.

President Trump ordered Gallagher moved out of the brig while awaiting trial. Later the president overturned his demotion after his conviction.

Spencer who’d been the Navy Secretary since 2017 questioned the commander-in-chief’s intervention in a “low-level” disciplinary action against a service member.

“The president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices,” Spencer writes in the Post.

Navy cancels review of others in war crimes case

Meanwhile, in a new development, the Navy is canceling a review hearing for three other SEALs implicated in the Gallagher war crimes case. The move allows Lt. Jacob Portier, Lt. Cmdr. Robert Breisch and Lt. Thomas MacNeil to keep their coveted Trident pins, which symbolize their membership in the elite SEALs unit. Thomas Modly who became Acting Secretary of the Navy this week said in a statement that neither the Navy nor the SEALs… “deserve the continued distraction and negative attention that recent events have evoked.”

Modly’s announcement follows Trump’s declaration on Twitter that the Navy would not be taking away Gallagher’s Trident pin.

Spencer while still Secretary of the Navy chose not to interpret that tweet as a direct order. He scheduled a review hearing that could have led to Gallagher’s removal from the SEALs. In response Spencer was ousted from the top post in the Navy.

The need for military discipline

Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine veteran with the Truman National Security Project says taking this case out of the hands of commanders sends a message to others in the military.

“A review board of SEALs is the appropriate next step,” Goldbeck says of the Navy’s decision to suspend the review hearing of Portier, Breisch and MacNeil. “It’s disappointing to see the president undermine his leadership in this way.”

The former Navy Secretary, Spencer, says in his op-ed that military discipline works best when senior leadership stays out of it.

“Our system of military justice has helped build the world’s most powerful navy; good leaders get promoted, bad ones get moved out, and criminals are punished,” Spencer writes.

He adds that ethical conduct and the military justice system that enforces it are hallmarks of the U.S. military.

“We are effective overseas,” Spencer says. “Not because we have the best equipment but because we are professionals.”