TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Storms That Hammered Area Flooded Parts Of Zephyrhills

Tribune photo by JULIE BUSCH.

Workers clean up debris near a car caught in the flooding on 7th St. at 6th Ave. in Zephyrhills Wednesday.

ADVERTISEMENT

Reporter Nicola White contributed to this report. Reporter Neil Johnson can be reached at (813) 259-7731 or njohnson@tampatrib.com.

Published: January 23, 2008

Updated: 01/23/2008 03:39 pm

A line of thunderstorms marched slowly across the state Tuesday night and this morning, flooding areas on both coasts that saw more than half a foot of rain fell in a few hours.

Pounding rain in east Pasco flooded a fire station and Zephyrhills City Hall. On the state's east coast the rain crept into some homes and businesses and closed a ramp to Interstate 95.

The storms also dropped hail over Odessa, Land O' Lakes and Clearwater, the National Weather Service reported.

In Zephyrhills, where 6.1 inches of ran fell, water seeped into the city hall basement, and up to 4 inches flooded a downtown fire station, doing a lot of damage, Fire Chief Keith Williams said.

Officials had no estimate of the damage cost.

Flooding at city hall was confined to the basement but the building was able to open. The deluge also temporarily closed several city streets.

Long after the worst of the storms left West Central Florida, they soaked Central Florida, then reached Palm Beach County.

One storm parked over Boynton Beach for three hours, said Barry Baxter, meteorologist in the weather service Miami office that covers Palm Beach County.

"It set up and just didn't go anywhere," he said.

From 5 to 8 a.m., the storm poured 8 to 10 inches of rain on the coastal town. Baxter said some businesses and homes had minor flooding and the I-95 exit ramp at Boynton Beach was closed for about three hours.

The heavy rain was concentrated around the Boynton Beach area.

"A few miles away they didn't get much of anything," Baxter said.

For the Tampa Bay area, eastern Pasco County appears to have gotten the worst from the swarm of thunderstorms.

Radar estimates from the National Weather Service show southeastern Pasco got 4 to 6 inches of rain, and one observer near Zephyrhills reported 6.1 inches, said weather service meteorologist Ryan Sharp.

The storms also dumped hail over Odessa, Clearwater and Land O' Lakes.

The weather service reported that hail the size of a dime fell for 15 minutes in Odessa and that some places got hail 1-inch in diameter.

The hail hit between 10 and 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. It came when the thunderstorm cells grew tall enough to reach some cold air and allowed the rain to freeze, Sharp said.

The storms and an upper-level disturbance moved quickly from the west and clashed with a stalled front over Central Florida. The disturbance tapped into some moist air, producing thunderstorms more common in the summer than late January.

There was enough energy drifting off the Gulf to keep the storms intact for hours as they moved slowly across the Tampa Bay area then tracked over the rest of Florida. Orlando received about 1.5 inches.

Once the thunderstorms formed, however, they moved slowly.

The rain struck Zephyrhills in such a torrent that pumps designed to move water to a retention pond were overwhelmed.

I've been here for 20 years, and this is the first time I've seen water come into the building. We didn't get as much rain in four hurricanes as we did in three hours," said Zephyrhills Fire Rescue Capt. Ralph Velez.

The parking lot of the fire station was under water when firefighters left on a call about 1:30 a.m. today, and water was in the building, soaking everything on the ground floor by the time they returned about 30 minutes later.

The onslaught of storms meant the city had no time to prepare.

"The big thing is it caught us off guard. When we have a hurricane forecast or a tropical storm forecast, we sandbag," said Shane LeBlanc, parks and facilities manager for Zephyrhills.

The flooding revived arguments that the fire station and city hall should not be in an area prone to flooding.

Members of a volunteer network who record daily rainfall and send the data to a Web site reported rain in the Tampa Bay area that ranged from the high of 6.1 inches near Zephyrhills to less than an inch in Pinellas Park and 1.3 inches in Plant City.

Reporters Chip Osowski of News Channel 8 and Lisa Davis of The Tampa Tribune contributed to this report.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT