![]() It’s usually one drainage well per acre, Flynn said. Some have only one, depending on the size of the parcel. Some developments might have seven or eight wells. If City Hall had a drainage well and was built to current standards, it would not have flooded.” “They’d most likely be connected to the street drainage. “Some of the older buildings like City Hall don’t have them,” Flynn said. Jay Flynn, owner of Flynn Engineering in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, estimates that more than half of the buildings downtown are equipped with drainage wells that send rain water down into the aquifer. In many cases, they are replacing buildings that were not designed to any standards in terms of flood requirements and elevation and hurricane code.” “The new high-rise projects are designed to a higher standard than the buildings that were there before. “The development standards in Fort Lauderdale, Broward County and probably throughout the world are more strict today in most aspects than they were 50 years ago,” Botek said. ![]() ![]() New development has to adhere to a higher flood standard, said Stephen Botek, president of Botek Thurlow Engineering in Oakland Park. The airport was hammered by the storm and got the bulk of the rain, the National Weather Service said.ĭrone pilot Doug Thron captured overnight video of more than 100 cars stranded in high floodwaters in downtown Fort Lauderdale on April 13. It has massive swales and natural drainage and it was one of the last areas hit by the rain to recover.” Without all those high rises and shopping centers diverting all that water, things would have been worse. “The worst flooding was in areas that have not been redeveloped, like Edgewood. “If you were to have driven around downtown you would have seen that the paved shopping center parking lots were pretty much dry,” Ladd said. Many of the new buildings and shopping centers in downtown Fort Lauderdale have drainage wells that send filtered stormwater 100 feet down into the aquifer, Ladd said. “There more than likely will be other intense weather storms, whether it be a simple rainstorm or a hurricane or even tornadoes.”Īll the new construction actually helped make the flooding less intense, Ladd said. “Hopefully we’ll have lessons that we learn,” Trantalis said. The storm was one for the record books, dumping 26 inches of rain on Fort Lauderdale in a matter of hours, Trantalis said. We should focus on facts and stop trying to distract public attention with misstatements.” I take exception to comments that say paving over the city is causing flooding when in fact it’s not. It’s hard to write a playbook for something we’ve never experienced before. I think we need to realize that natural events like this are often unanticipated and sometimes difficult to respond to. “So much worse could have happened,” Trantalis said.
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