Gators in backyards. One Beaufort County neighborhood lagoon floods after Debby downpour

“Alligators are swimming in our yard,” was the exasperated report from one Hampton Hall homeowner.

Residents of the gated community watched as alligators and other creatures swam through one of Bluffton’s manicured neighborhoods as torrential rain from Tropical Storm Debby blurred the boundaries between their yards and the nearby lagoon.

Portions of the Hampton Hall community are beginning to look more like their sister community, Hampton Lake, as one lagoon overflows with rainwater. The storm combined with drainage issues caused car accidents, created unsafe road conditions and trapped homeowners. “Hampton Hall is a mess,” homeowner Donna Brown said. “My house is surrounded by water.”

Brown said the water from surrounding neighborhoods feeds into Hampton Hall. “The lagoons have flooded, and streets are flooded,” she said. “We are stuck and could not leave if we wanted.” The trouble centers around a portion of Hampton Hall where nearby houses surround a lagoon. The overflowing water creeps towards homeowners’ back doors. The roads in front of their homes have anywhere from two to five inches of water in them, they said.

The slow-moving tropical storm dumped 11 inches of water on the community, according to representatives of its HOA. “This is as much rainfall as during Hurricane Matthew,” HOA President Daniel O’Donovan wrote in an emailed statement.

“There is flooding everywhere low! Our house in Hampton Hall now has three lakes next to us!” homeowner Anthony Petrone said.

Water swirled into the road’s drains, showing that the system was working, but not fast enough. Trucks and cars barely struggled through on Wednesday.

Some drivers didn’t make it through the water. Firefighters needed to save people in the community twice this week.

On Monday a driver hydroplaned into into a nearby retention pond. On Tuesday a food delivery driver got stuck on a road with four to five inches of water on it. Both drivers got to safety, but the same cannot be said about their cars, the Bluffton Township Fire Department said.

“If water is covering a road, stop,” the fire district said on Facebook. “Turn around. Take a different route. The life you save may be your own.”

Hampton Hall’s homeowners association is responsible for its own hurricane preparation and maintenance because the community isn’t part of Bluffton’s town limits.

“The bottom line is, Hampton Hall really needs to do something,” said homeowner Dave Miller.

“As far as the lagoons, I don’t think that there was anything done regarding storm preparation for that,” homeowner Cedric Gray said.

“If they can figure out how to move water from one area to the next, that would really help mitigate a lot of the flooding that’s going on over there,” Gray added.

HOA President O’Donovan told the Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette that Hampton Hall retained a civil engineering firm to evaluate our system’s capabilities and areas for improvement earlier this year.

“We share in the concern and frustration that many homeowners in Hampton Hall are experiencing damaging flooding to their property,” he wrote via email.