Inland flooding from hurricanes, heavy rains a frequent problem in Florida
- Better engineering from the early days of state development could not stop the flooding
From Jim Singletary’s Deltona home, the open ocean is an hour’s drive away, the water seen from his house is called a “creek” and, until two years ago, he could say his house was not it has not flooded in 37 years.
Hurricane Ian, however, broke through the floodplain, washed away his 2,555-square-foot home and displaced a Boeing engineer who had been stationed on the ground. for more than a year.
Like four out of five property owners in Florida, Singletary didn’t have flood insurance, so he had to pay his savings to replace everything up to the foot mark. 4 in his house – and kitchen cabinets. It’s a similar sight to what the public recently witnessed in large numbers when Hurricane Helene battered the mountainous, inland Appalachia region of the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia.
Non-coastal damage from Helene’s damaged facilities is not expected to be a significant loss for insurance companies because most of the damage was uninsured – less than 1% of the affected counties insurance against the flood, they leave victims, like Singletary after Ian. to repair the damage in their pockets, industry experts say.
“The house has been there for 37 years, and we didn’t flood, so we didn’t have to worry about it,” said Singletary, who declined to say exactly how much of the renovations were done to his southwest home. in Volusia County how much it costs but he posted a total of six figures. .
Hurricanes are not the only problem
Inland flooding problems are likely to worsen as Hurricane Milton crosses Florida from coast to coast with another deluge of heavy rains.
However, there is no need for the damaging water to be the result of a typhoon or storm surge that damages property, or generates flood warnings miles from the ocean. Florida’s flat, low-lying terrain, its limestone geology and its development patterns combine to present a continuous and sometimes unpredictable threat from water sources that experts fear they will become more visible with increasing temperature and humidity.
“Pretty much all of Florida is a coastal plain,” said Tom Missimer, a professor of hydrogeology emeritus at Florida Gulf Coast University’s College of Engineering in Fort Myers, who has spent more than half a century hundred learned about water management. “When we get a big rain event, there’s not a lot of storage in the ground to absorb the new water that comes in.”
In addition, says Don Duke, Missimer’s colleague in the FGCU environmental department, the increasing speed of asphalt development in the world. The result is more water running–from and accumulate in the absorption area.
The state has built structures — canals, dams, reservoirs and pump stations — to consolidate the flow, but sometimes those structures can take too much, said Tommy Strowd, executive director of the Lake District. Lake Worth. Even retention ponds can become a threat to property, given the wrong conditions, he said.
Human-made settlements to deal with the constant amount of water
He compared storage ponds to parking garages in the way they store water, like garages that stop cars from moving. But when the flow becomes too heavy, all bets are off, he said.
“When everybody’s trying to get on the roads at the same time, then you tend to see traffic, so, you know, the rain works the same way,” Strowd said. “When you have more rain than the canals can handle … then those ponds can rise and overflow the streets, and in extreme cases, even flood homes.”
It manifests itself in different ways:
- Miles west of Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, thousands of homes reported flood damage in the April 2023 rain that rivaled the 44-year record for rain in a 24-hour period, set in Key West. State insurance regulators have estimated losses from last year’s rain in Broward County, which came without warning, at more than $90 million.
- Flood advisories in South Florida’s Hardy and Glades counties, National Weather Service records show, occurred only a few times from 2019 to 2021. However, in the past two years, the number of advisories it doubled, with 19 tips in Glades and Hendry counties last year.
- Landlocked Polk and Orange counties suffered storm damage — about $500 million — from Hurricane Irma in 2017 that was the size of coastal Collier County, according to CoreLogic, which provides banking, insurers and government agencies in the risk model.
Drain the water, divert it and prevent further development
Jay Jarvis, director of roads and drainage for Polk County since 2012, said awareness of water and drainage issues has increased dramatically over the past 30 years.
In the olden days, open ditches, culverts and levees were the primary tools used to reduce potential flooding. Planned improvements, with more houses with better engineering to handle the flow of water on a large area of land, came later.
However, despite improvements in engineering and design, there is only so much that advanced human-made efforts – the construction of sinkholes, pump stations and underground pipelines – can do. do to control the accumulation of water, said Jarvis who has worked in drainage and storm water. Polk County since 1991.
“When you get event on top of event on top of event, where the water just piles up. … The systems can’t handle that,” he said. “There’s nowhere for the water to go.”
From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Polk County spent $4.3 million on drainage, erosion control, pump station upgrades and pipelines. Over the years, the county also purchased the land of about 200 addresses to prevent them from being rebuilt.
Jarvis says property owners need all the help they can get.
“I can say that the intensity of the rain seems to be increasing,” he said.
Complaints of mixing water and flooding are pouring in again
The conflict between water and developed assets – and who will pay for costs and mitigation – continues in many ways.
In Loxahatchee Groves, a September rainfall that the Florida Climate Center at Florida State University put at 3 to 4 inches above average, prompted a flood of complaints about wet conditions at the September City Council meeting.
Jane Harding, who has lived on her D Road property for eight years, was in tears, telling the court how her horses’ hooves are at risk of disease because of the flooding, water on her property.
Director of Public Works Richard Gallant told the council that he does not have the capacity to respond to all of the current demands, noting that many of them involve private property issues and criminal violations.
“I’ve probably fielded about 40 different calls from citizens from almost every street in town right now,” Gallant said. “We don’t have the staff, we don’t have the budget, we don’t have the resources to go to every street in this city to do what the residents should have done since they bought their house.”
For the first time since she moved there 10 years ago, Dianna Babington said her stalls were overflowing – and this came before anything else. on the website of the National Hurricane Center that has a name that he can worry about, he said.
“I don’t know how citizens are supposed to fix their problems when they are dependent on other citizens… who don’t have problems,” Babington said.
Babington left last month’s meeting shaking his head.
He said: “I left the meeting thinking that no one drives a boat. “I didn’t think flooding would be a problem on my property.”
He said he is taking matters into his own hands, hiring a contractor to improve the drainage around his stables.
Don Duke, professor of water resources in the Department of Ecology and Environmental Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, said Florida is a particularly difficult place to place large populations because of the way it has been slow to clear water. And mistakes were made when it started, he said.
“In the early days of Florida settlement, there was a feeling that if we just dug a ditch, all that water would flow out to the ocean and we’d be left with it,” he said. -have dry land. And that was very easy.
He sees the need to plan development from a broader perspective – across county lines – becoming more urgent.
“We’re seeing more runoff from storms of the same size than we used to and we’re getting bigger storms — bigger storms — so the way we’ve changed land use is add to the flood.” he said. “We did it without regard to sustainable design.”
Anne Geggis is an insurance reporter for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at ageggis@gannett.com. Help support our media. Register today.
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