TAMPA, Fla. — Ashley Palacios Vera and her brother, Andres Garcia, remember it like it was yesterday.
When Hurricane Idalia skirted past Tampa Bay last August, storm surge flooded their street and a neighbor’s home in Tampa’s Palmetto Beach neighborhood.
“The whole street was filled with water,” Garcia remembered.
Now, he and his sister are scared about what the next storm season might bring.
“If anything’s going to happen to the house — like any water damage — what are we going to do,” she said. “If something does end up happening, where are we going to go?”
Right now, the City of Tampa is studying what it can do to better protect Palmetto Beach and the area South of Gandy Boulevard.
The South of Gandy community is another flood-prone area, and many neighbors feel the flooding has been exacerbated by over-development and the recent approval of high-density developments.
In a Wednesday meeting, representatives from Benesch, a consulting firm hired by the city to study the flooding issues and recommend solutions, explained that there is no silver bullet to quickly reverse problems that were decades in the making.
“It’s all of Florida, right? There’s a ton of development in Florida that — for better or worse — popped up along the coast and is very vulnerable,” said Demian Miller, a principal associate with Benesch.
However, Miller and his colleagues said there are small solutions the city could pursue, like putting certain limitations on development in coastal high hazard areas, buying flood-prone properties to improve drainage, establishing a program to distribute free rain barrels to neighbors, and/or planting more mangroves along shorelines to reduce wave action during storms.
“We’re looking at more localized solutions,” Miller surmised.
However, before Benesch makes its recommendations to the City of Tampa, it’s looking for more feedback from the residents of both South of Gandy and Palmetto Beach.
Learn more about the study by clicking here.
The next meeting on the flooding issues will focus on Palmetto Beach and is scheduled for Mar. 26 at 6:30 p.m. at the DeSoto Park Community Center.
