DOVER, Fla. — It has now been one week since Hurricane Milton and some are still without power and trapped because of flooding.
10 Tampa Bay toured conditions in Durant and Dover in eastern Hillsborough County and saw homes still cut off by a flooded retention pond.
People in about a half dozen homes in the Whitlock subdivision have been stuck with roads covered by several feet of water, some here still don’t have power. Others won’t have a place to live even when the water goes away.
Glenda Thurow and her husband haven’t left their house in a week when floodwaters boxed them in like a moat.
“I'm 88 and we feel very isolated,” she said. “I'm to the breaking point. I would like to be able to get in my car and go someplace, even just for a cup of coffee.”
Robert Perez lives up the street and says recent development in one of the fastest-growing parts of Tampa Bay has made runoff worse.
“We have several neighborhoods that bleed into our retention pond,” he said. “This is pretty much the low-lying area around here so it catches all the water that can run off.”
Farther east on Durant Road, Don Neely was sleeping during Milton in a trailer he’s renovating to live in when he woke up to water surrounding him and the floor caving in.
“There was a fish jumping next to me,” he remembers. “I put on my boots and then it was just like I look out the door, and it's dark, obviously, power's out and all I could see was water.”
The floor disintegrated along with his plan to live there.
“Now I’m screwed,” Neely said. “They're changing where the water goes. They're pushing the poor out. That’s what they're doing.
Just like Perez, he says a historic storm was made worse for him because of rapid growth.
As he figures out where to live next, Thurow just wants to dry out. The county put in a pump on Monday, but she’s lost all her patience.
“They're pumping water, but it's like draining a bathtub with a teaspoon,” she said.
That pump is running around the clock, and the hope is that the water will go low enough for a crew to inspect the main pump that stopped working when it went underwater.
If officials can get two pumps going, residents are hoping they can get out in the next couple days.