Forest Creek residents lose it all - again - as 269 evacuated due to serial flooding

Water rushing up to their knees, Forest Creek Apartment residents waded out of their homes barefoot with their night clothes still on.

Thursday night into Friday morning, severe thunderstorms are estimated to have produced more than 17 inches of rain in some areas, more than enough to the displace 269 residents of the West Pensacola apartment complex.

Escambia County Area Transit buses waited on Patton Drive to transport residents to the Marie K. Young Community Center as a temporary shelter.

Devastating flood events like this have happened multiple times at Forest Creek, but for Quanisha Robinson, who has lived in the apartment complex with her three children for just four months, the suddenness and severity of the flooding was a complete shock.

“I had a flash flood warning come to my phone but the office, knowing it gets bad out here, did not put any signs telling us to evacuate or telling us to leave, so we are at home thinking everything is normal. We literally just lost everything just that fast,” Robinson said.

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Robinson was trapped in her apartment, as the floodwaters made it impossible to leave the complex. It was not until a boat came at 3 a.m. that she and her children were able to evacuate.

According to Escambia County Public Information Manager Andie Gibson, beginning Thursday, 146 residents from Forest Creek Apartments and 80 people staying at the Maxwell REAP center were evacuated to the Marie Young Community Center.

Friday, an additional 123 from Forest Creek Apartments were evacuated and seven private citizens voluntarily evacuated to area shelters.

This is the second major flooding for Faith Purify who experienced it first in 2011. That time she was helping community members evacuate, helping the Red Cross, passing out snacks and keeping the residents' children busy.

Purify recently had two strokes and moving is difficult for her. She watched helplessly as the water had rushed in and flooded her neighbor below and the surrounding area.

Escambia County Fire Rescue assisted residents onto a rescue boat, but because of her stroke the vessel was too difficult for Purify to board.

She ended up waiting to for Sheriff's Office deputies to arrive in a high-water rescue vehicle.

“When they came back and got me, I walked so far leaning against people's cars and then they pulled up to me and it took like three guys to push me up,” Purify said, describing abandoning her apartment. “And I helped out as much as I could and I made it inside of that truck. They took us from the truck to the top of the road and then we transferred from the truck and we got on the bus.”

She was one of the few dozen who went to Marie K. Young Community Center for shelter.

Forest Creek, located at 34 Patton Drive, is owned by the Texas-based Marquis Group. The complex receives federal housing vouchers for low-income tenants and has a long history of flooding in high-rain events.

After a heavy 2014 flood at Forest Creek, Escambia County applied for a federal grant to purchase and demolish the apartments and relocate the residents. That grant expired at the end of August 2019.

Around the same time, Escambia County offered to purchase the complex for $11.9 million from Marquis Group but was rejected. The group made a counteroffer asking for $15.5 million, but a deal was never made.

The very next year, residents were told they had to leave when more than 20 inches of rain fell in the area after Hurricane Sally struck the Panhandle in 2020, bringing waters as high as four and a half feet in some of the units in the Warrington complex.

Gee Nobles grew up in the Forest Creek Apartments and he remembers flooding has been an issue ever since he was a child.

He is a football coach for the local Brent Raiders team and came out to help his young football players, aged 5 to 6, and their families get to safety. He arrived in the morning and saw the flooding was so bad they had to get another sheriff truck to come because the first was stuck saving residents.

“By the time the morning hit and I did get out here it was way worse than I thought it was,” Nobles said. “I got a few kids on our little league team, some of their parents wrote to me like, ‘Come through, come through, where are y'all? So I just got up and played my part man.”

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: West Pensacola Forest Creek apartments flood, 269 residents evacuate