Deltona sees widespread flooding after Ian brings record-breaking rainfall to region
As Ian dissipated Monday over southern Virginia, residents and officials in West Volusia were still grappling with the deluge the storm brought during its visit.
The month of September usually brings approximately 6 inches of rain to Deltona. After Ian, which brought 11-15 inches to the city, Deltona closed out September with 20 inches of rainfall.
This equates to a 100- to 200-year storm event, Ron Paradise, the city's director of planning and development services, said in a memo.
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Mayor Heidi Herzberg said the region already was saturated before Ian hit and the lakes were already at high levels.
"We are a city of lakes," Herzberg said by phone Monday. "There’s just only so much we can do in terms of mitigating where the water can go."
She said Ian's impacts should give city officials an idea of where stormwater funding should be directed.
"Like any disaster, it exposes areas you need to strengthen," Herzberg said.
Prior to Ian's arrival, according to Paradise's memo, the city did the following:
Managed basin levels where possible. An example is the city maintaining the lake levels in Lake Gleason basin to afford volume to minimize flooding;
Kept ditches free of debris;
Kept drainage inlets and related flow structures clean and free of debris;
Ensured pump stations were operational;
Prepositioned pumps as appropriate;
Made sandbags available to residents
Efforts in the aftermath include:
Increasing pumping capacity;
Where possible, aggressively pumping flood water to outfalls and basins with available volume;
Physically hauling flood water in tanker trucks to other basins where capacity is available;
Keeping stormwater infrastructure flowing and functioning as effectively as possible;
Opening up several drainage flow ways within the Lake Theresa basin to the outfall to the St. Johns River
The latter of those efforts would effectively drain the chain of lakes situated within the Lake Theresa basin, which appears to be where the most severe flooding occurred, Paradise said in the memo.
In addition to Theresa, the chain of lakes also includes Dupont, Three Island, Angela and Butler.
While the actions would not result in an immediate reduction of floodwater, "preliminary engineering analysis indicates there should be a measurable lowering of flood levels within a week," Paradise wrote.
Nick Lulli, who moved to a newly built home in Deltona within the past year, didn't think flooding would be a concern for him.
If he didn't own a pickup, he would still have effectively been stranded in his home Monday, Lulli said by phone.
"We chose to live literally on a sandhill scrub, one of the driest biomes in Florida, because we didn't want to have to deal with this," Lulli said.
Fort Smith Boulevard looked less flooded Monday, but the same couldn't be said of the side streets, Lulli said.
"It sits there until the ditch bottom inlets at the base of those side streets can start functioning again, once the city’s pond gets down to a certain level," Lulli said.
The new resident also said he's reached out to city officials for information as to how much water the dry pond, located northwest of his home, was supposed to be able to hold and where the outfall was supposed to go.
"We have to make conscious choices on how we use the water at this point," Lulli said. "Every couple of hours you can get a flush in."
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Ian: Deltona deals with floods as lakes overflow from record rain
