Drive through Fort Lauderdale’s Edgewood neighborhood and you’ll find some water still on the streets and pile after pile of waterlogged furniture. Every house seems to have a mound of mattresses, couches, rugs and bookshelves, all ruined by the floodwaters.
Four days after the deluge, residents here are trying to pick up the pieces.
“Traumatizing for the whole community and we just need help from everybody, anybody,” said Mike King, who lives on 30th Street.
“Well I’ve been here my whole life, my mom bought it in ’72,” said King’s neighbor, Barry Russell.
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I asked him if he’s ever seen anything close to this level of flooding.
“Not even close,” Russell said.
“You go up Federal Highway and it’s dry and everything’s back to normal, but people don’t come back here and see that it’s friggin’ ground zero disaster area,” said Wendy Wills, the homeowner’s association president.
It’s a challenge for all the residents. First, they survived the inundation of nearly 26 inches of rain in 24 hours.
“We had no way to get out, there were five fire rescue boats coming in and out of the neighborhood,” King said. “Very traumatic, scared, been through 20 different hurricanes and never been scared like this in my life, the water was chest-high in the road, nowhere to go.”
King has already ripped out the soggy drywall in much of his home to prevent mold from spreading. It’s like he’s starting his life over from the foundation up.
Wendy Wills had three feet of water in her home. Like everyone else on her street, she has cars parked in the driveway that will not run. The flood waters ruined the engines. Now she’s throwing everything out, onto the pile, a daunting task.
“We hit that wall yesterday at 8 o’clock at night from working almost 12 hours, and I’m like, I can’t do it anymore, I just can’t,” she said.
Everyone’s waiting for the cleanup truck to pick up their piles of drenched furniture. In the meantime, the city of Fort Lauderdale and the Red Cross have set up shelters and comfort stations, offering free meals and a place to take a shower. It helps, but people really just want to get back to living in their own homes.
“It is mentally very, very difficult what everyone is going through,” Wills said.
