ANNA MARIA, Fla. — Doug Copeland woke up at about 4:30 a.m. Sunday and stepped out of his bed into about two inches of water.
He spent the rest of the morning clearing out the standing water and cleaning up the mess as best he could.
“I’ve tried to squeegee and Shop-vac it out,” Copeland said. “Have most of the standing water out but waiting on some professional help to finish the clean-up.”
Overnight storm surge and heavy rain left many roads and some homes flooded out.
Copeland’s home, in the city of Anna Maria, located on the north end of Anna Maria Island, is just a block from the mouth of Tampa Bay.
“The fifty years I have been here, I have probably had water in the house about seven or eight times,” Copeland said.
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Those times include Hurricane Idalia, which grazed the county last October.
But this storm comes eight days before Christmas.
“All my Christmas presents were under the Christmas tree, and of course, they’re all soaked,” he added.
Copeland has plans to spend the holidays with his two daughters, one who lives in Sarasota and the other who is flying down from Maryland. But he fears that the walls in his home may be torn up by then.
The weather and flooding also affected those vacationing on the island.
“We’re slightly disappointed, but you can’t do anything about it. You can’t control Mother Nature,” Melinda Nilsson said.
Melinda Nilsson and her family drove over from their home in Melbourne on Saturday, arriving hours before the weather turned for the worse. They first visited the island in August and fell in love with it, returning for a tranquil family vacation.
But despite living in Florida, the family had never seen flooding like what they woke up to on Sunday morning. They had a partial power failure, but floodwaters didn’t reach their rental home.
“Basically, it came up a few inches below the door, so we did not fortunately get flooding,” Nilsson said.
The family hopes to venture out eventually to enjoy some of the beach activities they had planned.
“We’re trying to stay positive … and maybe eventually we will go out once the water a little bit,” Nilsson said.
