Tensions flare as city tries to offer answers for flooded Forest Hills

TAMPA — Emotions ran high Tuesday as residents of Tampa’s flood-ravaged Forest Hills neighborhood demanded answers and compensation from city leaders for damage to their homes during Hurricane Milton.

“We lost everything,” several people shouted over officials present at the meeting, including Mayor Jane Castor.

The neighborhood saw entire streets where residents’ homes flooded with as much as 8 feet of standing water after city officials said pumps and generators failed.

City Council member Luis Viera called the meeting, comparing the tight-knit neighborhood to something out of a Frank Capra movie. But tensions flared as residents balked at the officials’ responses.

“I know that there’s some concern or misconception that we may not have done our due diligence before this storm,” the city’s mobility director Vik Bhide said. “I can only share the facts as we know them and as sincerely as we document them.”

Three pumps failed at Curiosity Creek, the largest pond in the city, created after the neighborhood flooded in 1979. A generator was in place, but the transfer switch failed to turn on. The pumps at the two ponds around North Boulevard and 109th Street, which did not have backup generators, also failed.

Bhide explained that the city had checked the pumps and transfer switches and pumped down the ponds as much as they could. But some who lived near the pumps and said they never saw them being pumped down after Helene.

Residents shouted over one another:

“Bulls--t!”

“You’re lying!”

“I don’t want to hear lies. I want to hear facts.”

“We lost everything.”

“This was preventable.”

Castor said she planned to introduce a plan for generators to city council that would likely cost around $3.5 million, and she expected to get approval.

“We are here for you, we want to do everything that we can to help you get back up on your feet,” Castor said, urging residents to apply online for FEMA assistance. “We can’t reverse anything that has happened. If we could, we would. .”

Still, Bhide said generators were “low-hanging fruit” and that flooding likely would have occurred given the scale of the weather events if generators were in place. Moving forward, he said the city would likely need to think of “broader watershed masterplan” that would be far more costly.

“We got over 12 inches of rain less than a day, and that’s about a quarter of all our rain that we have for a year,” Bhide said. “Typically, that’s a lot of rain that inundated all parts of about six counties. This is an act of nature, and it overwhelmed many of our systems.”

The systems in place had the capacity to handle a 10- to 25-year scale weather event, he said, but what occurred was a 300-year event.

“This was a force of nature that we could not have ever prepared for,” he said.

Juan Tejada, past president of the neighborhood association, said he credited officials for coming out and staying an hour and a half after the event to answer questions.

Still, frustrated residents felt the city was doing little to help.

Some questioned how they could apply for FEMA assistance when they still lacked power and Internet. Others didn’t regularly drive and the closest library was still closed.

Wendy Hatfield, 56, saw flooding in the home she was born in and has been her family’s for four generations. Her daughter-in-law’s wedding ring, a family heirloom, was among everything else they had to leave. Still, she said, she felt lucky no one was hurt.

She said the meeting felt like a photo op and that most of the information shared was already known.

“We don’t need to hear that,” she said. “We need to hear what they’re going to do now to fix it. We already know everybody is suffering. We need to know what are you going to do to fix it, whether it’s the city level, county level, state level or federal level, somebody has to help.”

Hatfield worried for the 70- and 80-year-olds in the neighborhood who don’t frequently drive and have children out of state. Applying for assistance online, she said, is not easy amid other priorities like securing food, and felt the city could be doing more, going door to door to help.

Sherri Allen said she felt the city could have done more to prevent this.

“The city is responsible for this, but they’re not going to take responsibility,” she said.

Allen said she applied for FEMA assistance, but that they wouldn’t do anything until her flood insurance denied the claim. She said she would likely have to take on credit card debt in the interim to be able to fix her home and continue to live there.

She was frustrated hearing about a city barbeque that some residents didn’t know about or couldn’t get to because they were still stuck in their flooded homes.

Eric Mitchell said he hadn’t been back to work since the hurricane. He and his wife have been looking for places to stay after mold immediately took over their home.

“I’m going to be honest, I lost everything,” he said. “What they should have been talking about was cutting a check. Everywhere I go to look, it’s crowded. And they’re price gouging. $200 a night for a room? Come on.”

Viera said he planned to call for a city and county investigative commission to look into what happened with the infrastructure in areas that flooded. He said he hopes for transparency.

“Given the scope of the uncompensated loss that we have here, you need to verify on this,” he said. “It’s important to process all of the emotional, physical, economic trauma people have taken, because as elected officials, we have to carry that with us whenever we make decisions.”