Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Western areas harder hit
Decades of development, density impede drainage
rainfalls have inundated streets, yards and parking lots in many of South Florida’s western communities, where development has brought growth to the doorsteps of the Everglades.
This week’s rains have shown both the success and failures of the planned developments that dot the suburban landscape.
Many of the communities have taken on massive amounts of rain in a short period and flood waters have not reached their homes, but the neighborhoods still had to deal with impassable streets that looked more like rivers flowing through them.
Randy Smith, spokesman for the South Florida Water Management District, put it in simple terms: “Development didn’t cause the flooding. The rain did.”
But Lenny Vialpando, Broward’s deputy director of growth management, said developer decisions also have had an impact on what people living in the communities they built are now facing. The more land used for retention lakes and other drainage systems to accommodate storm runoff, the less the likelihood the water will be building up in parking lots and streets as quickly, he said.
Vialpando said devel-
opments have minimum criteria they have to meet, but then it’s up to a developer how much additional protection they incorporate into their plans. More lakes to store water will help keep roads and parking lots from flooding when the heavier storms come. Some developments rely more heavily on those roads and parking lots as their back-up plan. The main goal is to keep homes from flooding.
When new projects are designed, planning rules require them to be able to handle heavy rains on their sites and not contribute to the flooding of surrounding neighborhoods. Those standards are usually set to a storm that’s only expected to happen once in a hundred years. Figures were coming close to that level in some South Florida areas.
South Florida during the first seven days of June has already received almost as much rain as the region usually gets for the entire month, according to the water management district.
That includes as much as 14 inches of rain soaking some areas in Broward and Palm Beach counties over the past three days, with more rainfall forecast to come through the weekend. The steady showers sweeping across South Florida have been an abrupt change from a drier-than-usual winter and spring, when South Florida got just 60 percent of its typical rainfall.
“A lot of that deficit has obviously been wiped out,” said John Mitnik, the South Florida Water Management District’s chief engineer.
A day after Wednesday’s downpour, a portion of Boca Chase Drive, just west of Waterberry Drive, in Boca Raton, still looked like a pond as residents to the west remained stranded. The road is the only way out of the community.
Lorraine Gallagher is one of the residents stranded since Wednesday by the flooding. She’s frustrated that the road hasn’t been cleared up by now.
“We’re all pretty upset about it,” she said. “Doctors appointments and things to make and we can’t do it. We just can’t get out.”
She came out to the road Thursday morning to see if she could make it across the water.
“See, that’s too deep,” Gallagher says as she points at a gray car slowly going across the water. “It’s just not worth it.”
A sidewalk drivers were using to bypass the water became blocked when a driver became stuck in the mud while using it.
Some have described the recent downpours and subsequent flooding as being like a hurricane – but without the wind. But rain amounts from hurricanes and tropical storms can vary. Each storm, regardless of its wind speed, can bring the expected downpours of biblical proportions, or even a relatively small amount.
Figures from the National Weather Service show that there have been several, but not many, 24-hour spans over the years in which 10 inches or more of rain has fallen.
In the Fort Lauderdale area, the biggest one-day rainfall on record – stats span 1912 through 2016 occurred on April 25, 1979. On that day, 14.59 inches of rain fell.
In Fort Lauderdale, the three days encompassing June 5 through June 7 this year saw 8.12 inches of rain. That amount is second only to the total accumulation over the same three days in 2013, when 8.51 inches fell.
For West Palm Beach, the three-day period of June 5 through June 7 shows that 2017’s total of 6.24 is the highest amount for that stretch of days, with 1988 coming in second with 6.05 inches.
This month’s rainfalls have been higher in many communities to the west. At Sawgrass Mills in Sunrise, which has been closed for two days because of flooded roads and parking lots around the complex, 15 inches of rain over a three-day period was recorded.
A Davie pump station at Griffin Road and 172nd Avenue recorded 12.63 inches of rain in less than two days this week, said Kevin Hart of the South Broward Drainage District.
“Oh my God! This is crazy,” was the first thing Pam Jacobsen thought when she got to her Davie home Thursday afternoon and saw what used to be Southwest Seventh Court, transformed into a canal near 130th Avenue.
She just got back from a vacation in the Keys with her grandson Gabriel Pena, 8. Without any boots high enough or any way to drive down their street safely, the two put their legs in garbage bags, tied them just above their knees and started walking through the water.
A few blocks away, Mary Nicholasi said everything around her has been flooded for four days.
“There was flooding in the house. My roof started leaking. My bathroom caved in a little bit.,” she said.
Along with that, her cable and wifi are out and her 12-year-old son hasn’t gone to school in three days. Thursday was actually his last day of school.
“I just pray our power doesn’t go out,” she said.
The flooding had some homeowners looking for flood insurance, said agent Tom Martinez. He had gotten a number of calls in recent days about flood insurance, including one from a west Sunrise homeowner who was watching the lake behind his house rise 20 feet closer to his home.
Developers said the story could have been very different with plenty of flooded homes if the heavier rains that hit the region’s western portions had fallen to the east in older coastal neighborhoods that don’t have the storm water systems of the newer, western communities.