Wastewater floods Longwood home
Carol Edwards and her husband, Martin, sat on their couch watching the television news on Hurricane Irma when a noxious stew of stormwater and sewage started gushing into their living room from under two sliding glass doors.
“It was just flowing in,” Edwards said. “The smell was absolutely horrible.”
And the slimy goo wasn’t just coming in from underneath the doors of their Longwood home. It was also flowing out of their toilets and shower drains like fountains. Within half an hour, a foot of brown water filled their entire house on Tartan Street.
Residents of the small subdivision, which sits east of Rangeline Road and south of Longwood Hills Road, say flooding has long been an issue on Tartan Street because it sits in a lowlying area and rain water from all the other streets flows downhill to it.
Indeed, on Tuesday — hours after Irma had passed over Central Florida — Tartan Street residents were forced to use canoes to navigate their way to dry land because the street was impassable by car.
City officials said Irma dropped more than 12 inches of rain — a record amount for the area — within a few hours.
“The sheer volume of water was overwhelming, not just for Longwood, but countywide,” Mayor Joe Durso said Wednesday. “Water was flowing rapidly everywhere. This is a once-in-a-50- or 60-year storm. It was a significant rain event.”
Utilities Inc., which operates the wastewater lift station, never received a complaint about the lift station or flooded home after the storm, spokesman Tom Oakley said.
“When you get a big rain, it’s filled with a number of things. It’s full of animal feces, oil deposits. It’s kind of hard to track,” he said. “But the key is that people should contact us if there is a problem. We can’t do anything about it if people don’t contact us.”
Carol Edwards said she called 911 as soon as water started flowing in but was told that emergency crews couldn’t make it to the house because the storm’s winds were gusting over 40 mph.
“They told us they couldn’t get to us and that we had to fend for ourselves,” she said.
This week, family members and friends helped the Edwardses haul furniture and other items out of their house.
Their tile floors were damp with water. A bedroom filled with children’s toys used by their granddaughter reeked of sewage.
“It was up to here,” Carol Edwards said as she leaned down and pointed to a stain about a foot off the floor running across the back of her couch. They quickly grabbed anything they could find, ran outside in the pouring rain, filled their car and spent the rest of the night at a friend’s home.
Next door, water also poured into an empty bedroom in Nestor Rios’ home.
Ironically, the Edwardses never lost power during the storm. However, they quickly shut off the power because of the floodwaters entering the home.
Because they do not have flood insurance, the Edwardses don’t know if they’ll ever return to their home of 17 years.
“We’re now trying to get what we can get,” Martin Edwards said as he loaded a pickup truck with a couch and wiped sweat off his forehead. “We’re still trying to come up with a plan.”