Water was seeping in under Cynthia Slater’s Daytona Beach front door. It was 2022, and Hurricane Ian had already flooded the streets of her Midtown neighborhood. She had planned to stay, but it only took about 60 minutes for the flood waters to inch their way from the road to her door...
Slater, 68, knew she had to go. She had abandoned her home to water three times before.
“I had to wade out, get in my car. And I had to drive across the neighbor's lawn because I couldn't drive in the street,” she said.
Slater said she returned home two days later. Her living room was 3 feet underwater. She was greeted by a sickening wet smell wafting through her living room and knew that mold was on its way…
“Here we go again,” she said looking at her ruined home.
She knew the drill. Slater began moving everything out. She bought fans to begin the drying process and called contractors to begin gutting the walls.
Ian marked the fourth hurricane in 20 years that brought Slater’s house to ruin. The first was Hurricane Charley in 2004 and then Matthew in 2016 followed by Hurricane Irma in 2017.
“It was like back to back,” she said. “I can't take this anymore.”
Slater has lived in Daytona Beach all her life and has noticed the flooding getting worse. Even without a hurricane, she said a strong rainstorm would flood her road.
Daytona Beach is an example of a local municipality facing a Sisyphean hill to climb when preparing for the next big storm.
“The greatest challenge to local governments comes from rapidly changing flood risk profiles,” said Kelly Kibler, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Central Florida.
Local governments are spending millions of dollars to better meet flood challenges. However, preparing for another Hurricane Ian isn’t viewed as economically wise as experts estimate the cost of preparations would far outweigh the economic benefit. That line of thinking is based on the way historical storm patterns impact a geographic area. However, as powerful storms become more frequent, the government's reliance on historical storm data to control the level of flood mitigation is being called into question.
“It’s the definition of insanity”
A week after Ian, Slater went to a Daytona Beach City Council meeting. During public comment, She approached the dias and laid out before the council four pairs of wading boots.
“These are all of the boots that I had to purchase because of all of the (20) years of flooding,” Slater said. “I refuse to continue to invest in a home where as soon as it is repaired, two months, one year, two years down the road, we're flooded again and again and again.”
Video of this meeting shows the city council silently nodding in agreement.
“It's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and over again and getting the same results if we fix our homes,” Slater said.
Today Slater’s home looks fine. She has new furniture and the walls have been replaced. You can hardly tell it was destroyed by a flood, but her retirement account shows the scars. After insurance and FEMA paid $75,000, Slater had to dip into her retirement account for an extra $15,000 to cover the rest. In nearly 20 years, Slater has put in about half a million dollars into repairs of her home.
Insurance and FEMA have helped, but it was never enough to cover all the damages. In the wake of Ian, Slater is left with a thought. If stronger storms are getting more frequent, why is she putting money toward repairs, instead of the city investing in improved flood mitigation?
Midtown was just swamp and trees when Slater was a kid in the 50s. She is the youngest of seven children. Her dad worked as a carpenter and her mom a maid. Slater would travel with her for work on the beachside.
It didn’t flood much back then, Slater said. A notable exception was 1960’s Hurricane Donna – a major storm when it hit the tip of the Florida peninsula. It ripped its way north and past Daytona Beach as a Category 1 storm.
“It was fun because when it rained, you know we didn't have school. There was water in the street that we played in,” Slater said with a nostalgic smile. “But I don't ever remember the houses flooding.”
These days floods aren’t fun. Slater, as the local NAACP president, helps her neighbors navigate Hurricane Ian relief funding.
Many of her neighbors in Midtown have also gone through repeated disasters. Daytona Beach Mayor Derrick Henry’s brother lived in Midtown and weathered two hurricane floodings in the last 10 years.
“I know the pain that (Slater) experiences, is not hyperbole or overstated. It is accurate and resonates deeply,” Henry said.
Henry has served as Daytona Beach’s mayor since 2012. He’s been dealing with the flood conversation since taking office.
He too has noticed the problem getting worse with more frequent powerful storms.
“The flood mitigation is the greatest issue of my political life,” he said.
Henry made a similar statement in 2014.
“It’s certainly at the top of my agenda. We accept that it’s our responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen again, so we have more work to do,” he told the Daytona Beach News Journal after Midtown residents were dealing with another flooding from a strong thunderstorm.
Henry said that Midtown, in particular, faces troubles due to its geography.
“It's the lowest area of the city. It's like a bowl,” he said.
The Midtown neighborhood was built as affordable housing for first-time home buyers. Sitting adjacent and above is the neighborhood of Newtown where water trickles down to Midtown, Henry said.
Henry said he isn’t sure why developers chose the area to build affordable housing, as it was known to be swampy 40 years before it was developed.
For the last 12 years, Commissioner Paula Reed has served Zone 6, which Midtown resides in. Central Florida Public Media reached out to Reed for comment on Midtown but she did not respond.
Since Henry has been in office, improvements to Daytona Beach’s infrastructure have occurred including the expansion of retention ponds and improvements to drainage along Nova Road’s parallel canal.
But during Hurricane Ian, it wasn’t enough. The Nova Canal was blocked up by debris causing it to overflow and pour into Midtown homes.
Currently, the Florida Department of Transportation is working to clean and reshape the canal. The project costs nearly $900,000, according to FDOT.
As it stands, Midtown is in need of more help than just improvements to the Nova Canal. Last year, Henry announced that the city had secured a $3 million grant with the U.S. Army Corps. of Engineers. The city will pay about $500,000 for the Corps. to conduct a three to four-year study of how the area can be improved.
Henry said the solutions could cost anywhere between $75 million to $150 million. The Corps. will handle up to 75% of the expenses. Since the Corps. will be studying parts of Nova Road, Henry is hopeful that the city’s expense can be shared with surrounding communities that Nova extends to, such as Port Orange.
“From our perspective, this is the very best opportunity for us to be successful in addressing the flooding in the town,” he said.
A flood of water, a drought of money
Southwest of Daytona Beach the 1950s Orlo Vista community in Orange County found itself underwater after Ian, as well. Some reports indicated 5 feet of water at Orlo Vista’s lowest point.
Like Midtown, Orlo Vista also has a history of flooding. Prior to Ian, and just after Hurricane Irma the county began building a retention pond to withstand 100-year-storm events over a 72 hour period – the national and FEMA standard, said Daniel Negron the county’s chief engineer of stormwater management.
“The excavation will almost triple the capacity of the three connected ponds that overflowed during Hurricanes Irma and Ian,” according to an Orange County press release.
The excavation is set to be completed this summer in time for hurricane season, however, the pump station won’t be finished until next year, Negron said.
Previously, the community was designed to handle a 25-year storm event. Irma was the tipping point for the project. Orlo Vista had been repeatedly flooded prior to Irma, but money stopped the county from starting such a massive mitigation project, Negron said.
“Our regular stormwater management budget, we are allocated $5.75 million per year, and that's for the entire county. The cost of Orlo Vista (improvement project) alone was $23.5 million,” he said.
Negron is confident the new mitigation will be effective in protecting Orlo Vista, just so long as whatever storm comes next isn’t another Ian. The 2022 hurricane made landfall over Florida’s west coast as a Category 4 storm. It passed south of Orange County as a Category 1. The storm was classified as a 500-year storm (or flood) event.
Even with more severe storms expected, the county isn’t building for another Ian and most municipalities won’t either because the cost to do so outweighs the benefit, said Kelly Kibler, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Central Florida.
“As (storm) events become larger and larger, they tend to occur more and more infrequently,” she said. “So if we invest in that level of protection, it tends to diminish the economic benefit.”
The cost of flood mitigation is a problem many Florida municipalities are wrestling with how to handle against future disasters, especially as powerful storms become more frequent.
Prior to 2020, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s average hurricane season was classified as 10 named storms, six hurricanes, and two major storms. Today, NOAA adjusted its averages to account for a 30-year history, with the averages shifting to 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major storms. Each of the last four years has seen hurricane seasons with above-average activity. The upcoming hurricane season, starting June 1 is also predicted to be above average.
The rising frequency of storms and Florida’s booming population represent the greatest challenge for local governments and their expenditures toward flood protection, Kibler said.
“The probability of flood hazards is increasing because of climate change and sea level rise. But then at the same time, because the population of Florida is rapidly expanding, and sometimes development is happening in high-hazard areas, the damages that are being incurred by a given flood size are also increasing,” Kibler said. “They're both changing rapidly, it really sends that risk level spiraling upwards. And that's super difficult for communities to adapt to quickly.”
Using Future Predictive Models to build flood protection
There is another issue facing community flood protection – outdated storm mitigation standards, said Dr. Eban Bean, an assistant professor of urban stormwater management at the University of Florida.
Local flood mitigation systems are built based on an area’s geography, and storm frequency – or the history of storms.
“The understanding was that we get 30 years of rainfall records and that's representative of what we assumed was what we call stationary or a non-changing climate,” Bean said.
That’s typically how scientists determine which areas may be impacted by larger storms – 100-year and 500-year storm events can be statistically extrapolated from a 30-year rainfall record. As a result, building regulations both for the country and state take these measurements into account.
However, with the climate changing and powerful storms increasing (as well as the chances of another Ian) regulations, and state code and federal codes addressing flooding safety issues have not kept up.
“It is something that is not necessarily incorporated into our current approach,” Bean said.
There are debates among engineers and climate scientists about the best way to account for climate change in infrastructure.
One way to do it would be to begin incorporating predictive future storm patterns. That involves data from large-scale global circulation models running scenarios of carbon emissions to predict potential alternative futures of the world’s climate, Kibler said.
“If we're going to create engineering designs for a future climate, rather than based on a past climate, that would be a really smart way to go forward. But it's still a fairly new idea,” she said.
The newness of the idea is exactly why not everyone is on board in relying on it.
“The issue with future forecasting, obviously, is that it's the future, it hasn't happened. So there's an uncertainty,” Bean said.
Also, climate change affects places differently, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Still, Bean thinks there isn’t a future where predictive modeling isn’t used in some capacity to inform mitigation standards.
“Ignoring it at this point, it's not being based in reality,” he said. “I think that each community is kind of in their own environment, with respect to the development community that is creating new areas for population growth, and what their community is willing to accept.”
For now, the industry is at a tipping point where climate change-fueled storms will be putting legacy infrastructure to the test for as long as it remains in place or it’s retrofitted, Bean said.
While scientists on the county and state level are discussing the best way to move forward with flood protection, NOAA is in its second year of updating its national precipitation frequency standard, or ATLAS 15. Previous ATLAS editions have been used as a standard in estimating the rainfall of an area. Those estimates are used to inform federal, state, and local design plans for the nation’s infrastructure.
ATLAS 15 will be covered in two volumes, the first will account for historical trends, but the second will use future climate model projections. NOAA developed a new methodology (along with the Federal Highway Administration) to predict the changing climate.
ATLAS 15 is expected to be published by 2027.
Back at Slater’s
Over at Slater’s, there’s hardly any sign on her road that it was underwater 19 months ago. There are however nine sandbags on the side of her home, Slater said they’re leftover from Ian.
She thinks the city could’ve prepared better ahead of Ian, making sure drainage was clear before the storm, but Slater believes her city officials are taking the flooding matter seriously and is eager to find out what solutions the U.S. Army Corps. of Engineers will arrive at in the next two to three years.
When asked why she remains in a home that has flooded so many times before, Slater exhaled and paused. Her face indicated she’s been asked the question before.
“I love my neighborhood,” she said. “People ask me all the time, why don’t you leave?... This is my community. And I grew up here. And I wouldn't want to go to another area to make a difference.”
Slater thinks she can help more people through her work with the NAACP, and by helping those who were affected by Ian who are still navigating relief funds.
Still, she can’t help but wonder about the future.
“This earth has changed because of what man has done to it,” she said. “Twenty years from now, where will we be? How far underwater will we be?”
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