‘REALLY BAD REALLY FAST’
Eta brings dangerous flooding and damage to South Florida
Tropical Storm Eta walloped South Florida with wind and rain, downing power lines, tipping trees and trapping some people in cars with flooding that has left entire streets and parking lots underwater.
As Eta dumped up to nearly 14 inches in parts of the region, it was a horrific ordeal for some residents.
Suzie Montero was in her kitchen when the water started flowing into her Fort
Lauderdale apartment. Frightened, she grabbed her three kids, ages 13,5 and 3, and rushed out Sunday night along Northwest 15 Terrace. “Wehave to get out of here!” she told her kids.
The water reached up to her ankles in her apartment, then up to her knees. “It got really bad really fast,” she said. “All hell broke loose.”
She and her kids made it outside as the wind howled. “Please God, don’t let us get shocked,” Montero recalled, fearing downed power lines. They waded through the water to the truck of a friend who had come to help them.
Dangerous conditions loomed large. A driver drove into a Lauderhill canal, likely because he mistook it for water-covered payment, officials said.
The man, who wasn’t breathing when he was pulled from the water, remained hospitalized in critical condition, fire-rescue officials said.
Shutting down roads
Broward and Miami-Dade were hit hard by the rainfall, while Palm Beach County emerged relatively unscathed compared to the other counties. Delray Beach firefighters freed a driver who got stuck in his flooded car Sunday night. The firefighters waded through knee-high water to help him out, ultimately towing the car with one of the fire engines.
The flooding kept shopping locations such as the Sawgrass Mills mall closed while the Swap Shop in Lauderhill was entirely engulfed in water. In Weston, where many of the gated communities had flooded streets, the parking lot at the Cleveland Clinic was flooded and the city made arrangements for staff to park elsewhere and get a shuttle.
While his wife clutched their baby Monday, Evan Knight stood in a large bucket to survey the scene of knee-deep flooded streets in his Fort Lauderdale neighborhood. He was stuck in place because the water was too high to drive his car.
“I don’t know what’s in the water,” he said of his decision to use the bucket as his buffer.
Firefighters were helping people stranded in their cars, while other officials were tending to reports of downed power lines, Vice Mayor Steve Glassman said. Police officers were guiding drivers past roads where traffic lights weren’ t working or in areas that seemed impassable.
Tyrease Hooks lives with his mother in the same flooded apartment building as the Montero family and spent Monday afternoon trying to get the flood out of his car with awater vacuum. All the rooms in the apartment reached ankle-high levels and they have no power by order of the fire department, which asked them to power off the breakers after a refrigerator fire broke out in an adjacent apartment. The family
said snakes are crawling near the building.
Jennifer Rancher, of Fort Lauderdale, lives on the same flooded street on Northwest 15th Terrace as the Montero family. She dealt with water damage to her home. The stove is now broken from electrical surges and she’s afraid to drink the water from the tap. “There’s been no city workers,” she said of wanting the city to come help quickly.
Many cities spent Monday trying to assess the damage and start cleanup efforts.
In Hollywood, low-lying areas were flooded and because the canals were at capacity, the pumps couldn’t operate as effectively.
Cities such as Pembroke Pines blocked off streets with barricades to prevent cars fromentering flooded streets. Three parks were closed in Coral Springs because of flooding. And the Deer field Beach pier was shut down, allowing workers to assess the damage it sustained.
The flooding in Oakland Park was made worse “because cars would not stay off the street,” said City Manager David Hebert. The cars created wakes that pushed water into people’s homes. Other homes, especially on canals and lakes, had water damage because “that water has no place to go,” he said.
Therewere isolated reports of toilets not flushing in Pembroke Pines—a fallout from the sewer system being infiltrated with excessive groundwater.
Flooding was rampant through the streets of the Pembroke Isles gated community in Pembroke Pines, where residents said they were fortunate to have escaped any damage to their property. Children jumped and played in the water, which varied in depth from a few inches to as much as a foot and half in some areas Monday afternoon.
“Look, a new pool!” Pablo Quintero, 11, called out to his father, Oscar, 36.
Ana Franco of Southwest Ranch es didn’ t go to bed on an island, but she woke up on one. Overnight, the rains flooded fields on all four sides of her single-family home, on the corner of Southwest 172nd Avenue and 68th Street.
“All night the water was rising and rising,” she said. “One more hour of rain and it would have been in the house. I got lucky .”
In a Plantation neighborhood off
Broward Boulevard, the water was so high Monday, that Tanya Clark’s husband snapped photos of a woman in a bathing suit floating down the street in a rubber duck. Clark’s sister, also in Plantation, had water bubbling up fromthe wood floor in her living room.
“The wind was scarier than the rain,” she said.
Dealing with aftermath
Other cities said the cleanup from Eta will be long-term, such as in Hallandale Beach and Hillsboro Beach, which both said Monday they had significant beach erosion from the storm’s wrath. Dania Beach kept the entrance to the beach barricaded until after lunchtime, citing “sand we wanted to clean up [and] there was also a power line being addressed by FPL.”
It’s not just cities that have to deal with the cleanup, but homeowners, too.
By noon Monday, about 180 claims had been filed with state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the largest property insurer in South Florida with more than 250,000 policies in Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade-and Monroe counties. Of those claims, 115 were from Broward County, Citizens spokesman Michael Peltier said.
Sofar, it looks like Eta is generating “light to moderate” claims activity, Peltier said.
Rob Langrell, spokesman for St. Petersburg-based insurance agency Wright Flood, said the claims are expected. “Over the course of the week, we’ll likely see quite a few,” he said.
Montero, the Fort Lauderdale woman displaced from her home, hadn’t been able to return to her residence Monday to survey the damage. The family does not have renter’s insurance and had left behind her youngest child’s medical equipment, she said.
“I can’t even imagine,” she said of the mess she’ll see when she can return home and how she’ll recover financially. “Things were floating, our clothes were floating. Our mattress was on the floor and kids’ stuff was floating.”