The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Eta’s downpours cause floods in south Florida
More than 13 inches of rain swamp much of Miami area.
MIAMI— South Florida awoke to streets turned into shallow rivers Monday after Tropical Storm Eta soaked the region overnight. It dumped rain inland, caused storm surge along the coast and left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity.
More than 13 inches of rain fell in some areas, according to the National Weather Service, flooding front yards and back patios, threatening mobile home communities and creating dangerous driving conditions. By 11 a. m. Monday, three flash- flood emergency alert warnings had screeched over cellular phones, each time extending the danger period.
Water was knee- deep in parts of Broward County. In Plantation, Lemay Acosta, 38, surveyed the flood in his neighborhood on foot, wearing water boots, while towing Layla, his 2- year- old daughter, in a small boat.
“I’ve been at this house actually for six years, and we’ve never really seen it this high,” he said— not even during Hurricane Irma in 2017, when the worst thing that happened was that the power went out. “There’s a fire hydrant that was only exposed about 4 inches. That’s a foot and a half” of water, he estimated.
Acosta said he had watched nervously as the water rose to just outside the door of his house. He pulled his wife’s GMC truck higher up the driveway to keep it safe.
“Two, 3 inches more and somebody driving by fast, the wake would go in,” he said.
Emergency workers had to rescue a driver who drifted into a canal in the city of Lauderhill. The motorist was in critical condition, the fire department said. Canals had merged with roads, according to the department.
The driver who was hospitalized hadmade a wrong turn in a parking lot and inadvertently drove into the canal, said Capt. Jerry Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Lauderhill Fire Rescue Department. “Yesterday afternoon to early this morning was whenwe had torrential rain nonstop for hours and hours and hours,” he said. “We are getting tons of calls for motorists stranded in their cars. We’re urging people: Stay home.”
Eta, a rare storm to make landfall in November, the tail end of the six- month hurricane season, came ashore at 11 p.m. in the middle Florida Keys and moved into the southeastern Gulf of Mexico. But the “dirty” side of the storm — where the strongest winds and thunderstorms are — was northeast of its center and lashed the upper Keys and Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
The lower Keys appeared largely spared.
Miami- Dade and Broward counties had already seen so much rain before the late- season storm that the widespread flooding could take a while to fully recede. The rainfall in the region has been 15 to 20 inches higher than normal for this time of year, said Paxton Fell, ameteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami.
“They’re already supersaturated,” she said. “The ground can’t gather any moisture — or very little.”
Residents in wade rs ventured outside on foot to document the damage with their cellphone cameras. Cars whose drivers attempted tomake it through the floods stalled on the road. Intersections appeared impassable in many neighborhoods, including in Fort Lauderdale and Brick ell, near downtown Miami.
Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami said the surge along Biscayne Bay was a little more than 2 feet high. The city’s big pump in Brickell, which saw some 8 inches of rainfall, was undergoing emergency repairs andwas notworking Monday, he said.