TAMPA, Fla. — "Inside we had 10 inches of water consistently through the entire first floor,” Omyra Rodriguez said as she gave us a tour of her home. “We lost kind of everything on [the] first floor — appliances, toys, all of our furniture.”
Rodriguez’s home was one of the 30 homes in the Bayshore Beautiful neighborhood of Tampa that flooded after Hurricane Milton. The area is considered flood zone X.
“Neighbors just on Concordia who have sort of more of a ranch-style home, single, single floor lost, really everything,” Rodriguez said.
She’s talking about neighbors like Debbie Beno who have piles of debris outside her home a couple of blocks away.
“It was devastating,” said Beno, who has lived in the neighborhood for 34 years. She has never seen her neighborhood flood like this.
“I have no refrigerator, stove, sink, bottom cabinets,” Beno said.
Cabinets that now sit on the curb as piles of trash.
“The experience has been terrible and devastating,” Beno said.
Her neighbor’s ranch-style home was also flooded. The couple and their grandson are now forced to live in a borrowed RV outside their home while they rebuild. They didn’t have insurance.
“My neighbors had to cut out, you know, almost four feet of drywall. I'm about five-six, and this is the level of their damage. They can't live here,” neighbor Paige Lindberg showed 10 Investigates.
Beno said a pump issue prompted flooding back in 2015 when she had to do some repairs that were covered by flood insurance.
”They don't cover much, like they cover bottom cabinets. Last time, they gave me, like, $1,900 or under $2,000 for my cabinets, and I had to spend a lot more than that. And here we go again,” Beno said.
10 Investigates learned it was two years after that flooding event when the city of Tampa drew up plans for four parcels that were purchased to construct a drainage pond. While there used to be homes here, it’s now an empty lot called Concordia Park.
“This is the drain area, you kind of have to look a little closer, just because there's debris blocking the space right now,” said Michelle Turner as she showed us around the neighborhood, pointing 10 Investigates to issues they’ve been trying to get addressed with the drainage pond.
Emails we uncovered from neighbors to the city show concerns were raised as far back as 2020. City crews had dug a pond in the middle of the lot, but neighbors worried about the depth of it and the standing water that piled up after a thunderstorm.
The same concerns were raised in an August 2024 email when the city talked about digging the hole even deeper. The same month, neighbors took videos of an excavator out at the hole. Within days, that excavator was underwater from an August rainfall that nearly flooded Rodriquez’s home.
“We had referenced the first time we saw significant flooding in the area that should be above the water line,” Rodriguez said.
And while the emails continued, so did the problems, and by the time Hurricane Milton hit, dozens of homes were damaged.
“I think the city of Tampa just kind of ignores things,” Beno said.
“I'd like to see immediate action taken," Turner said. "I think we need an independent investigation just to help us figure out what the root cause of this event was, what we can do in the short term to make sure this doesn't happen."
Through a public records request, we were able to see the back and forth with city leaders and neighbors, but nobody from the city would speak with us on camera, so we reached out to city council member Bill Carlson.
He met us in the neighborhood, where for the first time, neighbors saw city crews taking action. We asked him why it’s taken until now for the neighborhood to see changes.
“Now that's one of the questions we need to ask," Carlson said. "And we know, in city council, we've asked for several reports. I've asked for an update to the overall stormwater plan from 2016. That report will come at the beginning of the year."
"We've also asked for short-term solutions for neighborhoods like this. It's obvious in this neighborhood, we at least need to clean the culverts before anything else,” Carlson continued.
Because that’s what was discovered here.
The council member walked the property with members of the stormwater department after he heard about the concerns, and they uncovered a culvert that had not been touched in years.
“Imagine if you went to the Philippines and found a World War Two pill box that was covered with jungle growth from 50 years, that's what these looked like," Carlson said. "And so now, hopefully, they're cleaning all of that, but it's obvious, at least on the second one, where they are now that water couldn't get through, so we need to make sure that we do proper maintenance."
Proper maintenance that neighbors say could have been taken care of years earlier if they had received a proper response years ago.
“The city has floodplain maps, and you can see where the water flows. This area is a bowl, so water comes from other areas into here, and because of the levee of the CSX track and the cross-town, the water can't get by," Carlson said.
"So they had to come up with a solution here. There are other areas, like Coachman that are bowls, also where the water flows in, and there's stormwater pumps there and wastewater pumps that we need to make sure are running," he continued.
For this community, they say much of the damage you see here could have been stopped, and they hope going forward there will be a prompt response to concerns especially when the problems have the potential to cause damage.
“We know we're likely not having sort of a Christmas celebration here. We haven't figured out the alternative yet,” Rodriguez said.
We asked Carlson how the city will be able to answer these requests and make sure proper maintenance is done in neighborhoods, and he says that they need to figure out if there’s emergency money where they can hire more stormwater staff and make sure they have enough people to investigate stuff like this.
The city has started working with the neighbors as well on more plans to help alleviate flooding in the neighborhood and is also setting up meetings to go over what the options may be.
“I don't think our goal is to point fingers at anyone. Our goal is to get attention to our neighborhood,” Lindberg said.