Chest-high water, boat rescues after ‘unprecedented’ rainfall in Fort Lauderdale area
Dozens of stranded motorists were rescued from vehicles on streets underwater and residents were taken to safety by boat from flooded homes after Fort Lauderdale saw record rainfall that was more in a single day than in some recent hurricanes.
A state of emergency was declared by the city and Broward County, the Red Cross deployed to a local park and Fort Lauderdale opened reunification centers for displaced residents.
Major roads across the county were impassible and littered with abandoned cars swamped by the rapidly rising water. Roads into and out of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport were still closed Thursday, leading to a total airport shutdown that is expected to end Friday. The Henry E. Kinney Tunnel in Downtown Fort Lauderdale was closed due to flooding.
“The amount of rainfall is unprecedented,” Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis said Thursday morning. “No city could have planned for this, no weather service could have warned about this.”
Broward County Public Schools announced Thursday evening the district’s more than 300 schools would remain closed Friday for a second day due to flooding and an estimated $2 million in school damage.
“Regretfully, we could not fully assess all campuses nor complete all the necessary repairs at those we were able to assess. Additionally, many of our staff were unable to access school campuses due to heavy flooding,” Broward School Board Chair Lori Alhadeff said Thursday night when announcing Broward district schools will remain closed Friday and likely reopen Monday.
No deaths have been reported, but Trantalis said that his city alone received more than 900 calls for help as the floodwaters rose. Fort Lauderdale called the state for help, and Florida sent airboats and high-water rescue vehicles to retrieve stranded residents.
While Broward County Mayor Lamar Fisher is optimistic the airport will reopen Friday, he said the Federal Aviation Administration is doing an assessment Thursday to make sure it is safe.
“Traffic is still coming and going hoping that they might be able to get on their plane, but that’s not going to happen,” Fisher said. “Please don’t come until we’re back open again.”
READ MORE: South Florida has seen three days of intense rain and flooding. When will it finally end?
While Trantalis said he expects the water to drain away slowly over the next few days, many roads remain blocked and city workers were vacuuming up excess water and unclogging drains across the city to speed things up.
Even Fort Lauderdale’s city hall was flooded. Trantalis said the building’s air conditioning and generator were swamped.
“It’ll be some time before we’re functioning again,” he said.
A dash to safety with two children and a dog
Water was seeping under the walls and overflowing through the toilet and tub in the single-story house where Dustin and Karly Andrews live near the Fort Lauderdale airport. By midnight, they took refuge on the couch with their children, ages 1 and 7, and Nala, the yellow Labrador. The floor was flooded below, the water rising.
“Once it started getting close to the outlets, I said we’ve got to get out of here,” Dustin, 30, recalled. “We’re standing in calf-high water.”
By then, they knew the front door wasn’t an option; the water outside was already high enough that they couldn’t push it open earlier. That left the windows, with Dustin going first and Karly handing him Nala and the children before heading out into the even deeper water outside.
“It was past my waist,” Karly said. “Thank God my husband has a truck.”
They drove through flooded streets, and past disabled cars, to get to higher ground in Davie, where Karly’s parents live. Dustin said floodwaters were still too high for them to get back home on Thursday, but he’s counting on having to replace most of the family’s particle-board furniture.
Video the family took before they left shows floodwater in the baby’s playpen as it covered the living room. A friend launched a GoFundMe page to cover some of the Andrews’ flood expenses, one of several that went live in the Fort Lauderdale area after the historic deluge.
In the Edgewood neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale, which appeared to have some of the worst flooding, residents on the first story of an apartment complex found themselves with water up to their waist late Wednesday night. They fled to the second story for shelter, and neighbors like 37-year-old Marcos Hernandez. Hernandez said his family of five welcomed in downstairs neighbors as well as a family from a nearby building, bringing the total in his small apartment to 15.
Outside, Erick Martinez, a 16-year-old student at Stranahan High School in Fort Lauderdale, spent the day canoeing down severely flood streets with his small dog Estrella aboard.
“It’s my first time seeing this place this flooded,” he said.
His home was flooded, and so was his uncle’s and his friend’s, when the torrential downpour swept through the neighborhood. Martinez thinks it may take two weeks for the waters to recede.
However, he isn’t afraid of more rain increasing flooding as “the damage has already been done.”
Emergency shelters see hundreds of residents
As heavy rains continue making roads impassable, Fort Lauderdale authorities were urging residents to stay off the streets Thursday.
Police and fire crews used boats, buggies and high-water vehicles to get to those stranded and in need of rescue.
About 600 people were brought to emergency shelter locations, city officials said.
The Red Cross is assisting with shelters, which are offering temporary lodging, food and personal care or health items.
Rescuing people from stranded cars
Broward Sheriff’s Office Fire Rescue Department rescued at least a dozen residents from their homes with boats late Wednesday night and early Thursday, said Battalion Chief Michael Kane.
The real problem was car rescues. Kane estimates that his team rescued nearly 100 people from their vehicles, which were stranded in water that reached chest high at some points.
He said the department was “extremely inundated” with calls for help.
“On a typical 24-hour period we run something like 300 calls, maybe 400 on an extremely busy day,” he said. “I think we were somewhere in the 500, 600 range in this 24-hour period.”
Frank Warren, with Sal’s Towing in Fort Lauderdale, said his company had received more than 300 calls for a tow in the last day alone.
“My phone’s ringing off the hook,” he said.
Manuel Alberto, 80, a resident of the Victoria Park neighborhood, said he arrived home last night from Portugal after arriving at Miami International Airport. A few inches of rain seeped inside his first-floor apartment unit, while knee-high water rose outside his door.
“The taxi driver drove like crazy,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t even know how I got here.”
Broward County Commissioner Beam Furr, whose district includes Hollywood and parts of Fort Lauderdale, told the Herald most residents he spoke with were staying in their homes until the floodwaters recede and the abandoned cars get towed out of the roads.
“We’re asking people, if you don’t have to go anywhere, don’t go anywhere,” he said. “There’s not enough pumps in the world to be able to pump it all out real quick.”
How much rain?
Early figures show Fort Lauderdale received more than 2 feet of rain on Wednesday, after several days of heavy rainfall.
Nick Carr, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service’s Miami office, called the 25.91-inch rain totals “historic” and confirmed that this much rain in a single day has a 0.2% chance of happening every year, which makes this a 1-in-500-year storm.
“Certainly, stuff you wouldn’t expect to see in that given location for many years,” he said.
It’s a staggering amount of rain — an entire month’s worth in a single day. It was just one inch shy of the highest amount seen in Hurricane Ian last year, and more than anywhere in the state saw from Hurricane Irma in 2017.
The preliminary rainfall estimate far surpassed the previous record of 14.5 inches in Fort Lauderdale.
According to AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter, it could also break the all-time Florida record for 24 hours of rainfall, which was 23.28 inches in Key West in 1980.
It rained so hard, Porter said, that visibility at the airport dropped to less than an eighth of a mile, conditions normally seen when it’s snowing heavily.
“Even during a hurricane, it is somewhat unusual to get rainfall rates of 4-6 inches per hour sustained over many hours in the same exact same spot,” he said in an email.
