Tampa Flooding - Sept 2024

On Wednesday September 4, 2024 I was about to leave work around 5:30pm and the rain was coming down hard. I opened Google Maps and everything looked pure red and my ETA home was +30 minutes higher than normal.

So instead I decided to kill an hour browsing social media and then drove south to visit the girlfriend once the rain died down. The drive down was such an interesting drive as I ran across so many stalled/flooded cars. The rain had stopped but the flooding was still receding, so I got a chance to find the flooded areas.

I hit one area that just messed with my head and sadly I had to cut the audio from this minute dash-cam footage due to being on the phone. As I approached this stop sign I heard a guy yelling on my right, two cars with hazards on, a train approaching, someone reversing and people splashing major water over this puddle.

I took advantage of a train coming - reversed a bit and just waited till the puddle had calmed down & train had passed for a safe transition. In this one relatively safe drive for myself I saw so many cars that I presume were ruined. I'm happy I just wasted an hour at work which largely improved my drive.

I can't imagine being one of those cars who rushed home at 5pm and got stuck in situations where roads got closed, people reversing off the highway and more. Lets start with a Reddit post I noticed where people were making 3 point turns on the on-ramp to turn around. Eventually as the police arrived and closed the ramp - they did usher the cars to officially turn around and come down the on ramp, but in the moment with no police this sounds like pure chaos.

As I started watching Snapchat and reading Twitter I realized not only do you have to be worried about your own driving - you have to be worried about what a larger car will do to you. Some of these high rise trucks roll through the water at high speeds proud they have a vehicle that can traverse this condition. The wave/wake they leave behind them adds inches to an already high flood - that may be the push your car needs to flood itself.

It reminds me of this news report I saw where a truck clearly provides enough power to generate waves that move stalled vehicles.

Now obviously those cars were probably total losses before trucks went by, but if you trust only 10% of the comments you see online. Chances are a large vehicle going fast through water ended up causing the total loss of another without touching it. This bugs me as I saw plenty of larger vehicles plowing through water creating a wave.

It just doesn't make sense to me - its clearly better to go slow through water, but most people go fast. I guess people just wanted to get home from work at the cost of destroying other vehicles.

So then I just started "doom scrolling" this weather situation and finding more and more photos that were just eye opening.

Take this photo which shows deep water on lanes and people encroaching into the outer/inner lane for the high ground. Some cars attempted (or missed the deep water) and ended up destroying their cars. Others just ramped onto the curb and waited on high ground for the water to recede. This wasn't a hurricane, just a regular Wednesday so folks were busy with regular routines and thus caught off guard.

I live in Temple Terrace pretty far from intense flooding, but my weather station showed some insane rain with 3.42 inches an hour at 6:17pm that day. Paired with the 2.83 inches the previous day - we hadn't gotten a chance to recover the previous days rain.

Once I got home I kinda lost the urge to review all the flooding damage and instead wrote this post. I believe with Tampa growing, buildings going up and more we might need to revamp some water related infrastructure.

So I started researching massive water infrastructure projects and found the Chicago tunnels which blew my mind:

• 110 miles of tunnels.
• 8 to 33 feet in diameter
• 150 to 300 feet below ground
• 11 billion gallons of storage
• Started in 1975

Sure took awhile to build, but looks like a solid solution to move huge amounts of water or even store it. I wonder if Tampa has anything in progress or started that I'm completely unaware of. I know Tampa built out the C-135 bypass canal to prevent river flooding, but this is a different type of beast of urban flooding.