Island residents aim to prove ditch is a flooding problem

VENICE — Residents of Golden Beach were looking forward to a city meeting set for Monday afternoon at which they hoped to get some answers about the flooding Hurricane Helene caused in their neighborhood.

Many ended up with several feet of water in their homes and more than 20 were rescued from them in boats by first responders.

But the meeting was postponed in the face of Hurricane Milton, which poses an even bigger threat to them — and the rest of the city — than Helene did.

“Everybody’s going through it now,” said Marianne Robertson, who lives on Golden Beach Boulevard.

A group of residents held their own meeting Sunday to prepare for the city meeting, she said.

She said her neighbors are “really, really, extremely mad at the city,” which they blame for not addressing a flooding problem they say they’ve been experiencing for years and which they largely attribute to Flamingo Ditch.

It’s a 200-acre natural water formation that drains into the Gulf of Mexico between Island Shores Condominiums to the north and Venice Villas Condominiums to the south.

Their neighborhood floods when the ditch can’t drain to the Gulf through a city outfall, they say, and it was the blockage of the outfall, not the storm surge, that caused flooding during Helene.

City Engineer Kathleen Weeden said the surge came over the top of the dunes along the beach as well as clogging the Flamingo Ditch outfall. While that kept the ditch from draining, it also prevented water from flowing into the ditch.

As soon as the water level in the Gulf dropped enough to restore the gravity flow from the ditch, Public Works crews cleared it and the flooding drained, she said.

However, the people in Golden Beach believe they can construct a photo timeline showing the flooding preceded the surge by hours, and want to make that case to the city when they’ve put it together.

Former City Council Member Sue Lang, a Golden Beach resident, has “taken up the torch,” Robertson said.