NORTHWEST MIAMI-DADE, FLA. (WSVN) - The heavy rain is no longer falling, but the floodwater is sticking around in parts of South Florida days after the region experienced torrential rain.
Crews started cleaning and pumping out the floodwater in Miami Shores Thursday morning, and although the water has already receded a bit, it has left significant damage to homes in other parts of Miami-Dade.
Chiffon Hill-Rainey said she’s been mopping up the mess in every room of her Northwest Miami-Dade home for days.
“You can still see it’s still wet in here, but water,” she said as she walked around her room. “I still need to get all up in here. Water, water, water, water — pretty [much] all the way through the house. I’ve been mopping up ever since it happened. I’m still mopping. I woke up mopping. It’s all I’ve been doing.”
Hill-Rainey’s street is so deep underwater some small fish can be seen swimming through it.
“It was bad, real bad. Water coming in the front door, out the back door,” Hill-Rainey said. “We had water come in everywhere.”
Juan Rosabar, who lives next door, still has floodwater inside of his home.
“All the furniture, all the clothes are floating inside,” he said through a translator.
7SkyForce HD flew over the area of Northwest 102nd Street and 13th Avenue, where a truck drove through the flooded street to demonstrate just how much water was left long after the rain stopped.
“It started to smell because of the septic tanks and everything,” Efrain Torren said. “We only got septic tanks over here.”
In Angie Tourmalist’s Northwest Miami-Dade home, the floodwater is two inches deep, and it continues to flow into people’s homes.
“Too much outside. Over there, too much, too much,” she said.
She has been getting rid of everything that has been ruined by the rain.
Nearby, county crews have been working on the drains along the 1400 block of Northeast 146th Street hoping to clear the way in the event of another downpour, but more rain is the last thing anyone in South Florida needs, especially with so many areas still soaked.
“This the worst we ever saw it. It never been where we had to stay in the house and water coming in all our place,” Hill-Rainey said. “It never been this way, so we can’t understand why it’s like this now.”
Pump trucks arrived Thursday afternoon to take out the lingering floodwater in the neighborhood. Crews hope to have the neighborhood dry by Thursday night, so they can move onto the next neighborhood still dealing with floodwater.
The feeling about the flooding is mutual for residents of Miami Shores.
“My neighbor who lives up the top of the street is saying he’s never seen anything like this before,” resident Jamie Evans said. “Our next-door neighbor has lived here 20 years, he’s never seen it like this. It used to get bad and then they fixed the drains, but yeah, this is the first for us for sure.”
Evans kept an eye on the water levels outside his home and has been getting updates from the crew that has been trying to clear up Northeast 90th Street and 10th Avenue all day. He pointed out how high the flood got by the water marks on his fence.
“They’ve already taken out about a foot, 12 inches overnight,” he said. “There’s probably about six or seven inches left to go.”
Evans said his family’s garage is flooded, but the rest of the house is OK.
“It’s still a headache, but yeah, nothing too crazy,” he said.
He’s happy to see the floodwater going down slowly but surely and is hoping, like many others, that the rain that caused all this doesn’t come back any time soon.
“It wasn’t going down. The ground was just saturated,” he said.
Over in Hialeah, standing water continues to linger in the area of Palm Avenue and West 31st Street. The city used multiple pumps to dry up some of the floodwater.
“Every time it rains, this block completely gets flooded,” one resident said.
Many people across South Florida are keeping an eye on the forecast and hoping the weather stays dry.
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