SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — The region continues to see the residual effects of Hurricane Debby despite the rainfall having ended several days ago. Rising rivers and flooded communities remain the chief concern. The situation has forced some county leaders to extend their local state of emergency through to next Thursday.
National guardsmen approached several homes in Sarasota County where the flood waters were still inches from some doorsteps.
Others went by boat through flooded neighborhoods to offer their assistance.
Several neighbors in local communities are working together to get back to normal. In the Laurel Meadows neighborhood and areas near Palmer Lake, neighbors launched boats, canoes and kayaks into flood waters to reach their homes and gather some belongings.
"Yeah, it's a mess. Our whole house is all flooded. I don't really know how to describe it. It's just everything, everything just got flooded and we were looking around and we were like there's nothing we can even do," Paola Piascik, a Laurel Meadows neighbor, said.
The span of the flooding in Laurel Meadows, a community of more than 100 homes on Lorraine Road in Sarasota, seemed endless.
"It was very dirty, the rugs are floating. We actually went with the canoe into the house. That's how high the water was," Diana Carson, another neighbor, said.
Several other neighbors were able to get into the development using Humvees, an Army Surplus truck and swamp buggies. Many of them assisted with shuttling groups of families.
One group of neighbors, which included doctors who came in to help from Miami, began the day by transporting sandbags.
"These bags are basically to line the outside of our house what we're going to try and engineer is like a water pump to pump water out of the house," Dr. Daniele Mion-Bet said.
Like others who live in the subdivision and some of the other surrounding communities, Mion-Bet barely made it out before flood waters took over late Monday.
"Three hours we had 3 inches inside about 6 to 8 inches outside. The neighbor picked me up on a jet and I was able to pack whatever I could in 10 minutes. Our birth certificates, my medical school diplomas, our high school diplomas," Mion-Bet said.
After helping others, he finally got a chance to look at his own home.
"We'll pump water out, bleach, air dry. We're just trying to get there before everybody else you know," he said.
Many of the developments near the Celery Fields, including the Pinecraft neighborhood near Phillipi Creek, are also still reeling from Debby's impact.
It is an issue some of the neighbors admit they were not expecting to deal with in the location where they purchased their homes.
"As of two months ago, we were in a non-flood zone. Probably 90 to 95% of our neighbors have no flood insurance so you know we're kind of left to our own," Mion-Bet explained.
Despite the end of the rain and sunshine, the neighbors say the water looks to be lingering long, and there are now new concerns of the flood waters possibly rising.
"I don't know, we've lived here in this house for I think 24 years now and there's never been anything close to this. I definitely would like answers on why this happened because now it's a matter of when is it going to happen again," Piascik said.
Sarasota County leaders say storm damage surveys are now available to homeowners as they start plans to mobilize more assistance.
"What we have to do at the moment is allow the water to recede for a few days, get into these communities, start tracking where our creeks are overflowing, where the flooding occurred, and make sure we take notice. We need to engage with our community. Listen to our community and make sure we're not missing anything," Sarasota County Commissioner Joe Neunder said.
Neunder said the feedback from the community is essential to ensuring mitigation measures in the future.
"Any event like this will often and will always bring the question of how can we do better. How can we improve our roads, our systems, our infrastructure, how do we mitigate against flood situations," Neunder said.
"Me, myself, I will be ok, but I fear for my neighbors, who are kind of at the end of their work life," Mion-Bet said.
As the community waits for the water to recede, both state and county emergency managers have deployed to Sarasota County and impacted neighborhoods. FEMA liaison teams as well as the Red Cross are also on the ground and have begun the mobilization of volunteers. Emergency leaders have also urged community members to exercise caution as they try to navigate in and out of their flooded homes and neighborhoods, especially with the presence of deep ditches along the roadsides, various lakes and retention ponds which have all now blended in because of the flood waters.