Miami-Dade scrambling to repair damage from some of the worst floods in two decades

Multiple streetlights are down in Doral. Miami, Hialeah and Doral blocked off roads to deal with continued flooding. Cars now await their owners in tow yards. Employees were trapped overnight at the county’s animal shelter.

Hard and fast rain on Tuesday triggered some of the worst floods in Miami-Dade County since 2000, according to the mayors of Doral and Hialeah. Cities scrambled to repair the damage as flooding returned Wednesday afternoon after three days of intense rainfall.

In a press release, the American Red Cross said it had coordinated emergency aid for more than 60 families impacted by the flooding. Thirty-nine of those families were in a Miami mobile home community, where water entered some homes.

In Miami, the building ground floor in Mary Brickell Village is reportedly below flood elevation, the city’s director of communications, Stephanie Severino, wrote in an email.

A spokesperson in Miami Mayor Francis Suarez’s office said the pump in the village, which is meant to pump 30,000 gallons per minute, had not yet been completely installed. Additionally, Brickell Avenue, which usually has two pumps, was down to one while the other was out for repairs, wrote Severino.

And on Tuesday, the pump at the Belle Meade Station had a control panel failure and pumps had to be operated in manual mode. Severino wrote that on-call personnel and a maintenance contractor responded “immediately” to resolve problems with the pumps.

Portable pumps were deployed to Brickell Avenue, North Bayshore Drive, northwest South River Drive and Morningside and Belle Meade neighborhoods to control flooding, Severino said. While no canals breached, she wrote, water levels at Comfort Canal became “extremely high” and impacted water drainage in surrounding areas.

The city experienced nearly 18.5 inches of rain over the past four days, she said, and the rain was particularly intense on Monday and Tuesday. As a result, multiple streets were closed on Sunday and Monday. On Wednesday, parts of the city were still experiencing flooding. such as on southwest 34th Avenue.

On Tuesday, the Village of El Portal said it was aware of flooding along the C7 Little River Canal and had reached out to the South Florida Water Management District to request flood gates be opened. El Portal Chief of Police David Magnusson said Wednesday the canal’s water levels weren’t as high anymore.

“It’s not comforting when there’s water coming out of a canal onto your property,” Magnusson said.

Doral Mayor Juan Carlos Bermudez said he’s been trying to get state water managers to pump water off the roads in the older part of his city. “I have been trying to get the South Florida Water Management to get to work on this, because the canals were pretty full even before that rain came,” Bermudez told the Miami Herald early Wednesday afternoon. “The canals are still pretty high, for sure.”

Bermudez said the 18 inches of rain the city received mostly affected its eastern, commercial areas. There are multiple road closures where the flooding is still worst, including along 79th Avenue.

That was one of four locations around the county where crews were dispatched Wednesday to pump water from the roads, said Jennie Lopez, a spokeswoman for the Miami-Dade Department of Transportation and Public Works. Around 5 p.m., crews were en route to Northwest 79th Avenue between 25th Street and 36th Street.

By late Wednesday afternoon, Lopez said, 16 of the 18 county-run stormwater pump stations had stopped pumping water, meaning they had returned to normal levels.

“It’s an ongoing process as we try to mitigate the situation,” Lopez said.

Animal shelter shuts down

The road closure forced the county’s animal shelter on 79th Avenue in Doral to close on Wednesday.

Flora Beal, a spokesperson for the shelter, said about a dozen employees had to stay in the shelter overnight because flooding was too severe for them to drive home.

“It’s just dangerous when you have cars that are getting stalled,” Beal said. “The safest thing for them to do at that point was to stay at the shelter overnight.”

Beal said employees were able to use “gently used” bedding and comforters the shelter has for hurricane shifts. She said there was no flooding inside the facility, but water was still pooled in front of the shelter Wednesday afternoon. The county department was working with staff members to get vehicles towed that were caught in the flooding.

Bermudez said that while rain levels have gone down, there is “no doubt” there is still flooding in some of the city’s most problematic areas, such as between 25th and 58th streets. He said the private, older roads are more vulnerable to flooding.

Bermudez said a “good number” of street lights lost power Tuesday, and some are still offline.

While some businesses have closed, Bermudez said, the city is working on getting sandbags to businesses that are open to prepare for continued rain.

“This is probably one of the worst [storms] I’ve seen,” Bermudez, who has lived in Doral for 20 years, said. “If you don’t have to go out today, don’t go out.”

Other cities scramble

Most of Hialeah was dry again by Wednesday afternoon, but flooding remained a problem on the west side of the city, particularly between West Eighth and West 12th avenues, 31st and 28th streets, 30th and 24th streets and West Second and Palm avenues, Hialeah Mayor Carlos Hernández said. He said police officers and blockades remain in those parts of the city.

Hernández said there were reports of water getting into some houses in the residential area between West Eighth and 12th avenues.

The rain was just too much, too fast, said Hernández. The flooding forced Hernández to postpone Tuesday’s City Council meeting until Thursday.

“We haven’t had anything like this since 2000,” Hernández said. The flooding that year “was worse but we haven’t had anything like this in a long, long time.”

Both Bermudez and Hernández saw cars being towed Tuesday night. Hernández said vehicles had to be towed from the Okeechobee overpass because the pump meant to push water away was hit by lightning.

A pump station also went out in Opa-locka on Tuesday, City Manager John Pate said in an email to elected officials. Pate said the failure of the county station, which takes on Opa-locka’s wastewater and stormwater, caused “a larger issue last night than the city is accustomed to.”

Also in Opa-locka, which declared a flooding emergency last year due to its failing infrastructure, police responded Wednesday morning to an apartment complex, Glorieta Gardens near Northwest 135th Street and 32nd Avenue, over concerns that the ceiling might cave in from the rainwater. First responders concluded there was no immediate danger of a collapse, according to an email sent by the police department.

At the Cordoba Courts apartments at Northwest 135th Street and 22nd Avenue, resident Shalonda Rivers said the flooding was worse than she had ever seen before. One of her neighbors in the same complex had water seeping into her apartment through the floors, she said.

Residents of Opa-locka have dealt as recently as 2018 with feces leaking into flooded streets after it rains, but Mayor Matthew Pigatt said Wednesday that he hadn’t heard of any similar issues from the latest storm. Over the past four years, Pigatt said, the city has gone from having just two fully operational wastewater pump stations to having 16.

Miami Lakes Mayor Manny Cid said flooding continues in West Lakes and Royal Oaks, the two areas of the town Cid said do not have outfalls into lakes or canals. He added that a drainage project for Royal Oaks costing $1.2 million is underway, and a drainage project for West Lakes costing almost $2 million will begin in August. He said water in the rest of the town had dissipated by Wednesday afternoon.

“All of our lakes, actually, are pretty much right at the rim,” Cid said. “There’s not much more capacity.”

Some shops stay open

Despite the downpour, many businesses throughout the county continued operating on Tuesday and Wednesday. Steve’s Pizza on Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami continued to fill orders despite being “360 degrees surrounded” by water.

“We didn’t have any water inside the store — except for when a car came by and made a wave, we’d get some water in the dining room,” owner Jesse Valinsky said of Tuesday’s rain. The restaurant has not yet opened its dining room to customers.

Valinsky said that in some areas of Biscayne the water was a few inches deep but in others it was a few feet. He said because the infrastructure is overloaded, it doesn’t take much rain to cause issues, and Tuesday’s rain was “beyond anything from any previous hurricane or anything like that.”

“[But] we’re like the post office over here, we don’t ever close. Even if we have to put the ovens on the roof,” Valinsky said. “I just, man, I hope this isn’t the new normal.”