South Orlando residents spoke passionately of concerns with flooding and infrastructure planning at Monday’s City Council meeting, urging city leaders to take responsibility for localized flooding that recently damaged some homes in the Wadeview Park area, following a rainfall on Sept. 1.
Wadeview Park resident Stephen Harrison shared his own experience of severe flooding damage, saying he’ll need to totally demolish and rebuild the home his family just moved into last month.
“I was unable to return home, due to significant water accumulation on Orange Avenue and Delaney Avenue. I abandoned my car and waded home, only to find every room submerged,” Harrison said, addressing City Council Monday. “The damage is extensive, and it includes irreplaceable family memories.”
Orlando Public Works Director Corey Knight apologized for the difficulty city residents had experienced, saying the city’s stormwater system wasn’t designed to take on so much water.
“It was a tremendous rainfall event over the short period of time,” Knight said of Sept. 1, adding he saw data showing four inches of rain fell in one hour that day.
Typically, Knight said, the city designs for systems to handle about .85 of an inch of water per hour. “This [storm] far, far exceeded that.”
But longtime Wadeview Park residents like Robin Butler pushed back on city officials, saying in decades of living in the area, they’d never seen such flooding, even from hurricanes. Butler listed five significant rainfall events since 2011, each of which culminated in more total rain than on Sept. 1, when Orlando’s total precipitation was .08 inches, according to the National Weather Service.
The key difference between those times and now is the city’s ongoing Delaney Avenue Improvement Project, Butler and others said. Residents argue the drainage improvement project was poorly planned, adding more stormwater runoff to an already-taxed system.
“I stood on my front porch in absolute awe of nature and what was going on, and how the drains were not absorbing [water],” Butler said, describing her mindset on Sept 1. “Every single one of the storm drains was blocked.”
Adding to residents’ concern: another, simultaneous construction project happening nearby on Orange Avenue, which Orlando officials said is a project of the Florida Department of Transportation and therefore not under their purview.
Knight acknowledged more intense and frequent rain events are taxing the city’s stormwater system, which is in need of upgrades, but brushed off concern about the Delaney Avenue project.
“There's some frustration and there's some blame that has been levied on the Delaney project, but I want to be clear: this event was so intense that, project or not, you would have seen some of this level of what it did,” Knight said.
The city has yet to clarify what impact the project might have had. Several residents said Monday they’d previously shared concerns with the city about the project, before work began earlier this year.
Other parts of SoDo and Downtown Orlando also experienced flooding on Sept. 1.
Higher stormwater rates recently approved by City Council will help fund more upgrades to Orlando’s drainage infrastructure, which should help alleviate some flooding concerns in the long-term, Knight said.
“Over time, things get built up; things don't work. We are trying to correct some of that right now as we speak,” Knight said.
Isabella Browne, a Wadeview Park resident and landscape architect, handed commissioners copies of a map she made, outlining concerns with the area’s stormwater drainage system.
“It seems to me that with our stormwater fees increasing by at least 50% over the next four years, localized problem areas like ours should be a priority project, moving forward, for additional assessments of the existing stormwater infrastructure,” Browne said to a round of applause.
Meanwhile, Harrison said for now, his family’s just going day by day, living amid the flooding damage as best they can. He and other residents said Monday that more than anything, they’re looking for more accountability and transparency from city leaders.
“Your level of competency, empathy and leadership is an astounding zero,” Harrison said, addressing Orlando commissioners. “You have failed. You have turned your back on your community.”
