In Tampa’s Palmetto Beach, residents swim to survive dangerous storm surge

TAMPA — John Broderick, 42, couldn’t wait for the rescue crews any longer when he was treading water in his house in Tampa, struggling to breathe.

When the storm surge invaded the Palmetto Beach neighborhood late Thursday night, he said it seemed to rise by multiple feet every few minutes. It was coming too fast. The water triggered his natural gas lines, stinging his eyes and making him gasp for air as the flooding reached his roof.

So he took his cat and swam.

The wind was so strong it took him 5 hours to get less than a mile, the water so strong it ripped his shirt off his body. Partway through, he found an 8-foot metal boat attached to a trailer and cut it loose with the knife in his pocket, he said, climbing aboard and rowing with a shovel floating nearby.

He lives in evacuation zone A, but he didn’t think it would be like this. In Hurricane Idalia last year, the water only came to his porch steps.

“God gave me this boat,” Broderick said. “There were a couple times where I thought this might be it.”

His family has been in this area 40 years, he said, working on boats. After this, he doesn’t know if they’ll stay.

“There’s nobody in the neighborhood left,” he said, adding that many people were rushed to leave their homes. Broderick broke down his neighbor’s door when he heard them screaming, he said, and gave them a piece of styrofoam to float on. He hopes they made it.

As he rested on a dry patch of road on South 20th Street near the Selmon Expressway around 1 a.m., water rushed down the road like a river. Giant, dome-like Marathon Gas terminals were inundated, and the air smelled strongly of diesel. Night-shift workers from the plant stood on the road in waders, walking up to their waist to venture farther down the road.

With his last remaining phone battery, he took a call from Tampa Police, who had finally arrived at his home and were looking for him. An officer told Broderick there were too many people for the department’s boat, but that they were ferrying as many as they could to Ikea.

Just before 2 a.m., Broderick’s father made it to him, after abandoning his own truck down the road when water reached his chest.

The two of them reunited, along with Broderick’s cat, named Emilio Estevez, after Broderick’s favorite actor. Emilio who peered out, wide-eyed and soaked, from a carrier.

Frogs chirped in the water all around the two men. They sat shakily on the tailgate of a stranger’s pickup truck in the dark — waiting for the water to recede.

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