Hurricane Milton & Tampa

It was just a few weeks ago that Hurricane Helene struck Florida and left my folks and others home completely flooded. So when news of a CAT5 hurricane in the gulf approaching Florida was known - people of course had a reason to panic.

In masses people evacuated Florida ahead of the late Wednesday storm. With that rush of people leaving we saw grocery stores, gas stations and home tools (plywood, generators, etc) emptied out. Personally after evacuating for Hurricane Irma and finding my evacuation home more damaged than my home - I opted to stay regardless of what the forecast or trajectory had.

Going to the grocery store prior to a major hurricane is an absolute madhouse. I remember seeing the water isle completely empty and people crowded around the employee back storage just awaiting a pallet of water to be rolled out. However, none of that compares to what happened after the storm.

As we sat watching the live weather reports - the rain pelted and the wind picked up. Each gust eerie as the windows and doors rattled/bent in the power of a hurricane.

A short 10 second video I made while trying to catch some of the storm, but the wind was so powerful and the rain hurt against the skin that it ended up being quite a brief clip. The rain captured though was a perfect example of how much rain we got in such a short time.

Now I'm not sure why my weather station looks the way it does, but this helps show my little rain station got plenty of rain until the hurricane passed my area. So when I awoke I quickly went out to check the backyard - I wanted to see if I lost any trees or fence posts. Prior to that though, I was amazed as I checked my network that I never lost power once.

As I stepped into the backyard - to my amazement - not a single fence piece was broken and outside of some branches and fallen avocados - nothing in the backyard was damaged. I wanted to see how my mailbox handled the situation and that's when my attitude changed.

I opened my front door and was immediately startled.

I saw standing water in the street and partially covering my driveway/sidewalk. This made no sense to me as I looked to the right and saw no water, looked to the left and saw even deeper water. I was trying to figure out what happened, so I busted out my kayak and started building it.

As I kayak`d around at 6:30am I ran into people filming me - who were probably going through the same set of emotions to see their street flooded. At this point as I saw trees collapsed and couldn't quite figure out where all this water came from.

Sure some of the retention ponds had crested, but the tiny stream that connect the retention ponds had not. So at this point I was starting to believe it was the storm drains that weren't draining. Now unfortunately I don't have any GIS data or topographical map and my assumptions would probably be wrong, but this is what it seems like.

Some storm drains work, others do not. The city arrives with pumps and moves the water from one flooded storm drain to a working one. This makes no sense to me as it would suggest different underground network of water. So after failing for an hour to find any maps to validate my concerns - I requested this information from my local government (Temple Terrace, FL).

The water with a single pump was working extremely slow as it was probably draining a few retention ponds, storm water and more. The water didn't drain that quickly - my car (Hyundai Sonata) could not pass through the water until Sunday.

So while it looked beautiful, it was quite sad we still had damaging amounts of water not yet drained. It was damaging because you always have assholes even in your own community. These were people who drove through lawns to try and avoid the water - at the cost of breaking automatic sprinklers and damaging the lawn. You had people who drove lifted jeeps and trucks through the water causing wakes that crashed into cars and garages, which might have been the extra inches that ruined a car or garage.

As Sunday arrived and the water was finally almost gone - it was time to get to work preparing debris piles for pickup. While that was going on I noticed a large amount of police cars in the neighborhood and they were just going house to house. Getting curious why that was - they finally arrived to my house and walked up.

The conversation in bullet points went roughly like this:

• Water from Pasco (north of Hillsborough) is releasing water into Cypress Creek.
• Cypress Creek runs into Hillsborough River.
• Ponds in our neighborhood are fed with runoff from that.
• They expect water levels to rise and urging homes to consider moving their cars off the street/homes as the storm drains are still at capacity and not yet drained.
• They issue a volunteer evacuation in case the water arrives for select homes.
• They are bringing more pumps and building makeshift dams to prevent damage to homes.

So of course that catches me off guard as I figure I'm almost out of this mess. I check our local neighbor group and everyone is discussing the various iterations of the story they got. So I decide to go investigate these claims in person.

All I learned was it gets dark quick once the sun goes down. The damage from the assholes who crossed lawns was visible and having multiple pumps cleared the standing water extremely quick. I didn't see any dams or higher water level, so I returned home with some pictures and bug bites.

So for now I don't know what to expect, but perhaps I'll wake up with more water outside.