MANATEE COUNTY, Fla. — Wayne Douglas and his wife tried to get his mother-in-law to evacuate as Hurricane Idalia approached the west coast of Florida. Like most in Rubonia, she refused to leave her home.
But she woke up to three feet of water inside her home.
“Now we're in rescue mode. I came out here, and I couldn't even drive a Dodge Ram truck and I couldn't even go down the street. The water was too high," Douglas said.
He had to borrow his nephew's 26-foot box truck and wade in the flood waters to walk his mother-in-law out.
"It never flooded this bad. Water has breached the carport before, but it's never breached the inside like this before," he said.
Rubonia — a historically black and low-income community established in 1920 — sits alongside Terra Ceia and is prone to flooding.
"This is an older community that was built to the standards of that day. Some of the homes have been infilled, and if you notice, you have homes that are lower and homes that are higher, unfortunately," said Debbie DeLeon, Manatee County Neighborhood Services Division Manager. "Those homes that are under sea level? They don't fare as well. And that's basically what you saw here.”
Manatee County asked the state to send in the Red Cross to provide emergency shelter for those families, but residents did not want to leave.
“She is up to the house right now. So she says she's ready to come home," Douglas said. "She's 87 years old. It's hard to get her to understand that maybe it's not safe to be in there yet.”
Instead Red Cross has been providing residents with food and cleaning supplies.
“The next part of the process is damage assessment," Red Cross Disaster Program Manager Andy Cornett said. "We will send teams down to come do damage assessment in the area and then that creates a footprint of what the need might be in this area.”
Often these assessments can take from one to two weeks following a hurricane, but Cornett expects Idalia damage assessments in Rubonia to take just a few days.
Following those assessments, the Red Cross will be able to determine if residents qualify for financial assistance or other supplemental assistance from the Red Cross.
On Friday, the Salvation Army joined county and Red Cross efforts at the Rubonia Community Center. They served lunch and supplied residents with cleaning kits complete with sponges, gloves, brushes, mops and more to help residents clean up their homes.
Manatee County government recently completed a $4 million dollar project to improve stormwater drainage.
But some in Rubonia were left questioning whether it worked.
"I've seen more storm surge before with less damage," Douglas said. "But I do want to tell both sides of the story."
“Residents thought maybe it didn't work but it actually worked because it cleared up everything," county stormwater senior technician Louis Roff said. "No one never said it wouldn't flood again. And that's what the people really have to understand. "
Roff added that it is about minimizing flooding as much as they can.
Those flood waters had drained by Wednesday evening, leaving residents to clean up the mess.
"This is Rubonia. We're all a family. When it happens to one of us, it happens to all of us."