The pounding rains from Tropical Storm Debby had mostly subsided when Allison Cavallaro awoke on Monday, Aug. 5, but the water outside her home in the Laurel Meadows neighborhood of Sarasota kept creeping closer.
First, the water pooled on the street, then her lawn, then it was seeping into her A/C unit, her garage, and by late afternoon, it was sloshing around her living room. Then, the brown water lingered for days.
"We all were like, 'why aren't you pumping this out? What's going on?' " Cavallaro recalled.
Laurel Meadows was not in a flood zone, yet it flooded far worse than even some nearby neighborhoods, leading many to wonder why.
"This county is scared," Cavallaro said this week, standing near the RV where she now lives with her family. It's parked outside her home, which has been gutted due to all the water damage.
"If they don't get the real information, they're going to think it's over-development, it's negligence, it's all these things that we don't know."
On Thurs., Oct. 24, Cavallaro was among those in the standing-room-only crowd when Stephen Suau presented the results of his independent review of the flooding in Debby at Selby Library.
Suau was the first engineer to organize a stormwater department in Sarasota. He left that job more than two decades ago, and opened his own consulting firm.
Not long after the storm passed, he said the county asked him to do a third-party review of the flooding. Suau declined to be paid for it, wanting to be sure there wasn't a perception that the county had bought his opinion in any way.
"In thinking about it, I realized that something very unusual might have happened," Suau told the crowd at the event, organized by the Sarasota Citizen Action Network (SCAN).
Armed with an intimate knowledge of the stormwater systems around Sarasota County, the floodplains and the way water generally behaves here, Suau said an important clue came from a YouTube video posted by a resident.
About 35 seconds in, the video by Blayde Stone showed water flowing over Delft Road, heading west. The road borders the southern edge of Laurel Meadows and goes straight toward Cow Pen Slough.
"There's several inches of water that have gotten up over this road, and it's falling, like rippling over this road," Suau explained. He learned the video was taken on Wednesday, or more than two days after Debby passed by.
"I realized there was a breach," Suau said, referring to the earthen berm, or dike, that separates Cow Pen Slough from the Phillippi Creek basin.
Suau alerted the county. "I told them, go out to the end of Delft Road and just go south. And it's got to be down there somewhere. By the end of the day, they found it."
The breach was located in a graded earthen mound that is built between different water bodies to keep one from moving into the other, essentially dividing Cow Pen Slough from the Phillippi Creek basin.
The breach was repaired before Hurricane Helene came along in September, county officials confirmed.
Suau said a remote sensing method known as LIDAR showed the breach had been there since 2018.
"It's been there for a little while, five or six years. And when I looked at the video, you could see that it was like Brazilian peppers and woody plants that were in the breach," Suau said, referring to a video he said was sent to him of the location by the county.
Spencer Anderson, Sarasota County's director of public works, said he has worked closely with Suau.
"We became aware of the breached area after Tropical Storm Debby came through, and yes, that does appear to be a major contributing factor to the flooding in Laurel Meadows," Anderson told WUSF.
"The rainfall is the major reason, right? I'm not sure if there wouldn't have been flooding if that didn't happen, but there is most likely an exacerbating issue from the breach."
The heaviest rain from Debby drenched Sarasota on Sun., Aug. 4, dumping as many as 17 inches of rain in some areas before making landfall as a hurricane in the Big Bend region to the north.
The rainfall from Debby exceeded the 100-year standard that Sarasota's stormwater systems are built to withstand — up to 10 inches of rain in a 24-hour period.
Anderson said it's not clear how long the problem existed.
"The rainfall is a significant portion of what happened, but we're not 100% sure what was there prior to this. It's an area that doesn't have eyes on it very often," Anderson said.
Suau said his recommendations to the county will be delivered in the coming days. He says yearly inspections of such dikes should be common practice going forward.
For Cavallaro, hearing the presentation Suau gave provided some answers.
"It gave me peace of mind. I believe he's right. I believe all of the evidence lines up, and I'm glad that he put it out there. I feel like the county is being transparent, and they're keeping us up to date as they learn what's going on," Cavallaro said.
But she and other residents still have questions. Most of those who live in Laurel Meadows suffered six-figure losses, of belongings and damage to their homes that must be repaired.
Only a handful of families have been able to return to their homes three months after the storm.
"We want to know, is it going to happen again? Did you fix the problem for good? And why was it not fixed from 2018 on? What happened?" Cavallaro said.
She said some residents are considering legal action.
"If it shouldn't have happened, then shouldn't they be held responsible for the negligence? We don't know how that looks. We don't know if an attorney is willing to take this on. Hopefully so."
