Already soaked, southern Florida flooded by storm
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A deluge of rain from Tropical Storm Eta caused flooding Monday across southern Florida’s most densely populated urban areas, stranding cars, swamping businesses, and inundating entire neighborhoods with fastrising water that had no place to drain.
The system made landfall in the Florida Keys and posed a serious threat to a region that was already drenched by more than 14 inches of rain last month.
“Never seen this, never, not this deep,” said Anthony Lyas, who has lived in his nowwaterlogged Fort Lauderdale neighborhood since 1996. He described hearing water and debris slamming against his shuttered home overnight.
After striking Nicaragua as a Category 4 hurricane and killing nearly 70 people from Mexico to Panama, the storm moved into the Gulf of Mexico early Monday near where the Everglades meet the sea.
“It was far worse than we could’ve ever imagined, and we were prepared,” said Arbie Walker, whose Fort Lauderdale apartment was filled with 6 inches of water. “It took us 20 minutes to navigate out of our neighborhood due to the heavy flooding in our area.”
Eta hit land late Sunday as it blew over Lower Matecumbe, in the middle of the chain of small islands that form the Keys, but the heavily populated areas of MiamiDade and Broward Counties bore the brunt of the fury.
Forecasters said the system could intensify again into a minimal hurricane as it slowly moves up the southwest Gulf Coast. It is just far enough offshore to maintain its strength while dumping vast amounts of water across the lower third of the Florida peninsula. Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis called it a 100year rain event.
“Once the ground becomes saturated, there’s really no place for the water to go,” Trantalis said. “It’s not like a major hurricane. It’s more of a rain event, and we’re just doing our best to ensure that the people in our community are being protected.”
City officials dispatched some 24 tanker trucks with giant vacuums to soak up water from the past few weeks. Some older neighborhoods simply do not have any drainage. The city also passed out 6,000 sandbags to worried residents over the weekend, but water seeped into homes and stranded cars in parking lots and along roadways.
“There was just so much rain in such a short amount of time there was no where for it to go,” said Fort Lauderdale resident Morgan Shattuck, who took photos of flooding on her street that showed swiftly moving water near the top of vehicles’ wheels.
In the Keys, a mandatory evacuation was ordered for mobile home and RV parks, campgrounds and other lowlying areas. School districts closed, saying the roads were already too flooded and the winds could be too gusty for buses to transport students. But the islands were spared any major damage, and officials expected shelters to close and schools to reopen by Tuesday.