Milton made landfall off the coast of Siesta Key on Oct. 9 as a category three hurricane. The water spared Tampa thanks to a reverse storm surge, but neighborhoods like North Tampa that are above sea level or in Flood Zone X, flooded.
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), areas designated as Flood Zone X are determined to be outside of 500-year floods and protected from 100-year floods by levees. But Hurricane Milton dropped an average of 13.8 inches of rainfall on North Tampa, which the city of Tampa’s Mobility Department says is equivalent to a 300-year flood in a span of 24 hours.
Marc Chenard, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center said there are two primary factors in tracking and predicting flood threats.
“One is figuring out how much rain is going to fall, what are the rainfall rates going to be? And then two, can the ground or can the area handle it,” Chenard said
Councilman Luis Viera represents North Tampa and grew up in the greater area.
“I was very emotional, because I know these people, these neighborhoods,” said Viera. “To see those communities flooded, it hurt me a lot. It really, really did, because these were No Flood Zones, and these families never saw it coming.”
At the Oct. 17 meeting of Tampa City Council, Viera called for action: an independent study to survey Tampa’s stormwater infrastructure.
“This is something where a great amount of families, many of them lower income, blue-collar, working-class people have lost their homes, and there are reasonable questions about Tampa’s infrastructure,” he said.
On top of dealing with loss from flooding and waiting for FEMA aid, some residents, like the tenants on the first floor of Timberfalls Apartments, on East 113th Avenue, who were given two weeks to vacate their homes.
“I went to the office and I said, ‘Hey, my apartment didn’t have any water damage on the inside. Can I stay a little bit longer? Because two weeks is ridiculous.’ And they said, no, I had to leave by the first [of November],” Carisse Class Quiles, a first-floor resident, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
Class Quiles was able to find another apartment. But days before needing to vacate, but on Oct. 28, fellow Timberfalls Apartments resident Mary Jimenez was waiting for FEMA and the building.
“For the most part, we’ve been displaced,” Mary Jimenez, a Timberfalls Apartments resident, told CL. “I have a three-year-old daughter and we had to evacuate her first and foremost, because we didn’t want her to be in there.”
Timberfalls Apartments did not reply to a request for comment.
One of the causes for the flooding was a power outage that affected stormwater infrastructure throughout the area, including pumps in North Tampa at Curiosity Creek, East Ridge, Bougainvillea and West 109th Street, according to the Mobility Department.
The Mobility Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but its director, Vik Bhide appeared before city council,and numerous South Tampa residents over similar issues of flooding in Flood Zone X areas, such as Parkland Estates, Palma Ceia and Bayshore Beautiful, while he gave council an update on the South Howard Flood Relief Project on Nov. 7.
While it was known there would be a power outage, Taryn Sabia, a professor and assistant dean of research at the University of South Florida’s School of Architecture and Community Design, said there are other factors that contributed to the flooding, especially to areas like North Tampa, with older infrastructure.
“When we look at older infrastructure, it’s kind of a compounding situation, right? Power outages, a lot of rain coming within a short amount of time, saturated ground,” Sabia told CL.
Sabia is part of a team working on a countywide vulnerability study that she hopes will be released by the end of 2024. It was delayed to incorporate the impacts of Hurricane Milton.
Fletcher and Fowler Avenues flooded, as did areas of USF’s Greenway, including the home of bull’s future stadium where the university held a groundbreaking on Nov. 8.
Althea Johnson, USF’s director of media relations, issued the following statement to Creative Loafing Tampa Bay:
USF is fortunate that our facilities did not suffer significant, long-term damage from the recent hurricanes, and we have been able to reopen our campuses.
We recognize that many people in the Tampa Bay region, including in the university area, are facing significant challenges as result of the storms. We continue to provide assistance in a variety of ways to USF students and employees who are experiencing hardship, including those who live off campus in the university area or other parts of the region impacted by the hurricanes.
With any new project we will continue to consider and comply with requirements concerning stormwater drainage, flood mitigation and other environmental factors in our planning.
Sabia, the USF professor, is part of a team working on a countywide vulnerability study that she hopes will be released by the end of 2024, to incorporate the impacts of Hurricane Milton. She said water will go where it wants to go–and it crosses city and county lines—but there are ways to plan for it.
“One is looking for more natural stormwater management systems so that we’re less reliant on pumps where we can be, to make sure that we upgrade infrastructure and have a plan for upgrading that infrastructure, to find strategies for the coordination of that between our different jurisdictions,” Sabia said.
Councilman Viera said that the Hillsborough County Commission is interested in taking part in his proposal for an independent study. The commission will discuss it at their meeting on Nov. 13 and then will also speak, with Viera, about it to Tampa City Council at its Nov. 21 meeting.
Timberfalls Apartments resident Mary Jimenez cited a “lack of communication” from not only the building, but also the city.
“What is the city going to do? I think that’s the biggest question,” said Jimenez. “What are they going to do for everyone in the community who has been affected?”Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.
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This article appears in Nov 7-13, 2024.