OLDSMAR, Fla. — If you’re driving down Tampa Road in Oldsmar, things look normal. You’d almost never know that just a few blocks away, some people have lost nearly everything.
“Pretty, pretty devastating,” said Oldsmar resident Brandon Gray.
Gray has lived in the area for a number of years. He didn’t believe the storm surge warnings.
“I heard the reports, and we’ve been through several tropical storms where it came close, and I thought, 'Oh, it’s not going to get bad,'” said Gray.
“I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was surprised by how high the water got,” he added.
The surge reached several feet in certain spots of his neighborhood.
“Everything is just pretty much ruined. I had a refrigerator get burned out, dishwasher and a dryer,” said Gray.
He’s now working to replace what was damaged by the hurricane as soon as possible.
“It’s pretty sad. I have kids that I share custody with and I had to call them up and tell them that I can’t come home... It’s difficult for everybody, but yeah, for me in particular, my kids can’t come to my house until things get repaired and functioning for me to be able to take care of them properly,” said Gray.
Farther along in the neighborhood as you travel along Shore Drive, large piles of debris on the edge of driveways are starting to take over the road.
“Some of the people on this block lost everything. I mean their homes, I don’t know if the word for home is totaled, but they’re in essence totaled,” said Oldsmar resident Geoff Martin.
That’s where we found Martin. He’s in the middle of cleanup, too.
“Just been trying to clean it out before the mold sets and get ready for the next storm,” said Martin.
He and his fiance heeded the warnings and evacuated to Orlando.
“I came back first because we took two cars, opened up our front garage, and it was completely totaled. We looked at a ring camera, and we got about 4 feet of water,” said Martin.
Thankfully, their house was spared, and the garage took on all of the flooding.
“We did lose some keepsakes that we thought we were being smart that we had 6 feet up in bins. Kids' stuff when they’re in elementary school, documents, and the water got so high that having our shelves didn’t help. It lifted the shelves up. Everything fell over. So basically everything was ruined, and that’s probably been the hardest thing to deal with,” said Martin.
He was also shocked by just how much the neighborhood flooded.
“It’s actually surprising. I was a naysayer,” said Martin.
“The water was up to, we saw another camera view of the house across the street, the water was up to a foot below the top of their front door,” he added.
This community is now worried it could be even worse in the future.
“Kind of deciding if I’m going to pull the trigger on all this money before this hurricane season is over,” said Gray.
