Lake Bonny in Lakeland is among the many inland lakes and ponds that flooded out into neighborhoods due to rain and resultant river rise. (David Dickey)

It’s been a week since Milton kayoed Florida, but the punches just keep on coming.

While the roaring hurricane winds, storm surge, rain and tornadoes are gone, the water is not. The storm dumped 12 to 16 inches of rain on Central Florida’s flat, sandy terrain, and all that water is still trying to find its way back to the coasts.

One of the greatest water sinks in the state is the massive Green Swamp, which sprawls over some 560,000 acres through three counties northeast of Tampa. But that enormous stretch of wild lands can only hold so much water—and right now, its dumping way more water than normal both north and south.

Ruskin, on the Little Manatee River, was not flooded by the storm winds and surge, but rather by rapidly rising waters from the Little Manatee River. (WFLA-8, Facebook)

Residents of Clermont, west of Orlando, thought they had escaped the flooding until this week, when black water boiling out of the swamp via the Palatlakaha River and the Clermont Lake Chain rose and rose and rose—and started flooding land that had never in modern memory been flooded before. Soon it came over the sea walls and boat docks and into the pools and patios and million dollar homes—as well as the humblest trailer still left anywhere near water.

Green Swamp also drains south, though the Hillsborough and Peace Rivers. The Hillsborough runs right through the heart of Tampa, and now residents many miles from the coast are being flooded by it as the water continues to find its way out of the cypress swamps and flag ponds and heads seaward.

I used to hunt turkeys in much of the swamp, and at times in early spring, the upper Hillsborough River would actually be dust dry. Only farther down where springs welled out of the ground did it begin to flow. Now, everything within the boundaries as well as downhill is flooding. 

Clermont, more than 100 miles from the west coast, is being flooded this week by runoff out of Green Swamp, result of more than 16" of rain in the area last week. (Mike Myers, Facebook)

This is fortunately not the monster flash flooding that has so devastated the mountains of North Carolina, so people have time to get themselves out of the way, but their homes can’t escape. Hundreds of houses and condos and mobile homes and ranches have been flooded in inland Polk and Hillsborough counties, adding to the thousands flooded along the coast.

The Alafia River—not part of the Green Swamp drainage, but in the path of the storm, is normally a placid, slow moving black water river, but for the last week it has been a boiling flow. I used to have a home a quarter mile from the flow, more than 20’ above the normal surface of the river. That home had water right up to the doorstep this week. The river flooded both the homes where everyone in the valley lived and many of the places that they worked.

The massive rains also caused some leakage—minor so far—from the gypsum stacks located on the shore of the bay near Gibsonton. These massive mountains of waste material from fertilizer mining can leach toxic water when rains overwhelm the protection systems, adding to the nutrient load of the bay and clouding the water, which if sustained can kill seagrass beds. Researchers now report runoff may also be a factor in extending the red tides that plague the area with seasonal fish kills. 

Bottom line is, if this is our future, we will see a very different Florida before long. Some residents here have been flooded four times in four years. Many residents near the water were without insurance before the latest storm, and many more will be without it after Milton, with insurance companies departing the state wholesale. Those remaining may be forced to raise premiums so high that they will amount to more than the mortgage payment on some properties.

We may be looking at a time when waterfront living here no longer makes sense, and the beaches are bought back by the state and turned into undeveloped parks—a silver lining for all who could never afford property anywhere near the water here, but a sad end to the beachfront dream that many have enjoyed and many more aspired to for so long.

— Frank Sargeant
Frankmako1@gmail.com