Tampa Bay area residents faced severe inland flooding post-Hurricanes Milton and Helene in 2024. Local governments are now working on costly solutions, such as updating flood maps and creating stormwater management plans to prevent future disasters. Efforts include dredging waterways and buying new pumps and generators, but long-term solutions may involve heavy infrastructure investments to mitigate the impact of extreme weather events.
City of Tampa photo
A photo of the city of Tampa.
Douglas Woods was still sloshing through 3-ft.-high waves to get to his home in October 2024, nearly a week after Hurricane Milton put his Land O'Lakes neighborhood under water.
"I moved here in 1994, and I've had water in my garage a couple of times, so this is by far the worst that I've ever seen," Woods told WUSF Public Media in Tampa. "There's nothing to compare it to."
His neighborhood slopes downhill to Cypress Creek, but Pasco County managers still allowed dozens of homes to be built there back in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Seventy miles to the south, Alexandra Coe, who lives on Phillippi Creek, told a pair of Sarasota County commissioners earlier this year that she has been dealing with flooding for eight years.
Hurricane Milton, though, was a different animal.
"First, a 30-foot river came through my property, then a 50-foot river, and then a 70-foot river," Coe said in speaking with the Tampa radio station. "We looked at the flood maps together, we reviewed some other documents, and I said to both of them, ‘This 70-foot river that goes through my property is not in these flood maps.'"
Similar stories can be found across the Tampa Bay region. Last year's storms dumped feet of rain, causing creeks, streams and lakes to reclaim historic flood plains.
To the east, the Lakeland Livin' Mobile Home Park was underwater for weeks. Nearly 100 homes were allowed in the community's natural floodplain as Lake Bonny refilled areas that had once been wet.
And in northern Hillsborough County, where the city of Tampa is located, hundreds of people were trapped for days, even though their homes were not in flood zones, WUSF noted, but the only road into their development was — and it turned into a wall of water.
Dick Abare said his Carrollwood neighborhood has flooded numerous times since new subdivisions were allowed to be built.
"We were developed in the mid to late ‘70s, and two other communities have been developed since us," Abare said. "Development is what makes the world go round, but you have to allow for those of us who have been here [for a long time]."
Time to Prepare for More Than 100-Year Floods
All this begs the question: Why were homes allowed to be built in these areas to begin with? And what is being done to make sure this does not happen again in the future?
Tampa City Councilman Luis Viera spoke during a recent meeting about hurricane flooding in the Forest Hills neighborhood.
He said that communities "build, build, build and then ask questions later," but noted that it is important that the same mistakes are not repeated whenever new developments are approved.
"And [the] storm season in 2024 was a double punch to the jaw; after Milton, our jaw was broken," Viera said. "So, we've got to make sure that we learn from what happened and equip ourselves in the future."
Just two weeks before the storm rampaged across the region, Hurricane Helene dumped a month's worth of rain on the western Florida coast.
"And then we got Milton, so it was, unfortunately, a bit of a perfect storm," said Kyle Dollman, Hillsborough County's floodplain administrator.
He said the area received the most rainfall last year since recordkeeping started in 1890.
Many called it a 100-year flood event, although Dollman thinks it might have been a 500-year event.
Solutions Are Being Put Into Action
There are several ways to minimize future floods, but none of them come cheap. Building ponds, buying floodplains and restricting new development are just a few. But Dollman said those measures will not help areas that are already heavily developed.
"If we talk about buying a low-lying area, we're talking about buying it from private individuals," he said. "Unfortunately, it's probably not a scenario where there's a large swath of undeveloped land that we could just purchase. If there was, it would probably be doing a pretty good job on its own holding water and mitigating flooding."
There has been some movement mitigating the problem, however.
Sarasota County recently updated its Watershed Master Plan, WUSF reported May 8, 2025. It includes mapping wetlands and natural water channels and finding a way to pay for protecting those areas. That way, floodwaters can have a place to settle before reaching nearby homes.
After months of urging from neighborhood residents, the county's commissioners agreed to use $75 million in federal hurricane recovery money to dredge Phillippi Creek and other local waterways that overflowed their banks.
Fred Bloetscher at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton is a consultant for Sarasota County. He told the Tampa public radio station that he is working with county officials to identify problem areas before developing more detailed stormwater master plans and modeling to produce specific solutions for flooding in those areas.
"There's engineering that can occur and, ultimately, if this makes sense to the community, there'll be construction," he said.
Lakeland and Polk County are also studying what needs to be fixed so the historic flooding never happens again, and public meetings are also being held in Tampa and Hillsborough County.
Tampa already has plans to buy new pumps to move water around, along with generators to keep them running when the power fails.
Time for Municipalities to Step to Plate
But Dollman said permanently solving the problem will be much more costly.
"A lot of development was in place before regulations were out there and we don't just go out there and say, 'Hey guys, you know, this was permitted appropriately at the time, but you know, now things have changed and we're going to need you to put in a pond or something like that,'" he said.
Eventually, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) may update its flood maps, putting more people in areas that require insurance. That could force them to elevate their properties if they are repeatedly flooded.
Hillsborough Commissioner Harry Cohen was at a recent public meeting about inland flooding. He said that many systems may be designed for regular, heavy afternoon storms where the ground is not already saturated.
"But they can't handle these once-in-a-100-year type storm events. They're not designed for it, and we didn't pay for that when we built them," he said.
Now, Cohen said local governments have no choice but to step up.
"A lot of the older [equipment] is a problem," he said. "A lot of things that were done to older structures that maybe were done without permits or were done when things were more lenient … [has] come back to bite us now."
According to Cohen, the real question is: Do local governments want to invest in hardier infrastructure? He said the answer has to be yes — or what happened in 2024 may come back to bite the Tampa Bay region once again.
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