The Flood

Yes, all of these are my personal first-hand account of a flood. All of the videos and photos are mine. Feel free to ask me any questions about it! I’m very open about the flood and I tell everybody the details

Also I felt like I shouldn’t have to say this but since it already happened, do NOT use my photos or videos without my permission.

Summary

September 27th, 2022, Hurricane Ian passed through Central Florida which then flooded my entire apartment and took all of my belongings and car with it. I’m grateful that my parents took me in but all of my projects and irreplaceable items are all gone.

• On this page I will not only be giving a detailed account of everything that happened during the flood but I will also be providing screenshots of email alerts that I and other community members got from the apartment complex itself (or lack thereof) so if you’re a lawyer and you see something fishy let me know because I feel like that apartment complex owes me and a bunch of other people something.
• Here’s a reddit thread about all of the issues with the Place at Alafaya and the bs they put us all through.
• Someone released a video talking about the flood, and it was while watching this video is when I found out the entire complex had been abandoned. There were apartments that were unaffected by the flood but I guess they closed it. Crazy to see. Also you’ll see my flood video in there around 6:28

I documented only one video during the flood then the rest are pretty much the recovery after.

Full Story

Day before the flood:

• Looking at the weather and seeing that by the time it hits land, the hurricane should be reduced down to a tropical storm
• At this point we have sandbags already set up
• We got flooding alerts for the general area (like 100 miles of us) so we stayed up until 7am to make sure the flooding wasn’t happening around us.

Morning of the flood

• I woke up to a lot of wind and the noise of a continuous water droplet that I thought was our sink leaking again.
• I look at my phone, its 11:07 AM and my phones battery is only half charged. The power must’ve went out in the middle of the night.
• I look down at Sophia (my dog) and she looks a little nervous.
  • She always feels guilty whenever she uses the pee-pad so I thought that’s what it was.
• I wanted to “look at the damage” (Floridian post-hurricane activities) so while still laying in bed, I reach over behind me, I open my curtains and the GAAAAAASP that escaped my body when all I see is WATER.

• I tell Chris everything that Molly says.
• Since I’m already up Chris says maybe we should record our belongings for insurance purposes, so I do. He also says we should turn off the breakers so I do (just in case).
• I grab an empty backpack and I go to the living room to grab my medications. While I’m there, my laptop was on a medical table so I put the table the highest it can go. I notice there’s a small flow of water coming in through the front door. I then grab Sophia’s food and a glass bowl from the kitchen (for Sophia’s water) and go back to my room to put it all in the bag. Chris at this point is still laying down on his phone and I tell him to go pack his stuff because we need to evacuate like SOON. And he mumbles something about him researching floods idk. I grab my “emergency bag” with my social security and stuff in it. I already know that my clothes that are stored under my bed are soaked but I look anyways. Yup. Soaked. I had my socks in my closet in an elevated space so I grab a bunch of socks and underwear.
• Chris then decides that he’s going to call his dad. I ask why. He said maybe he can help.
  • His dad says to grab a bucket and put the water in the bathtub.
  • Chris grabs a bucket, scoops up a bunch of water, then goes to the bathroom.
  • Chris: “The bathtub is already filled with water!”
  • The water was coming up through the pipes. There’s nowhere to drain anything.
  • Chris asks me for duct tape. I ask why, he said he found where the water was coming in from. The front door! I should’ve thought of that sooner! Just plug the door! That’ll stop the issues! He plugs the hole, and gosh darn it the apartment is still flooding! No one could’ve predicted that.
• I call Molly back and ask her how they’re getting out of here because I know my car is already flooded. She said her brother has his work truck and I asked if we could hop in (mostly because we didn’t know the conditions past our complex and I’d trust a truck over Chris’ car). She said there’s space in the bed of the truck but she’s headed out in like 2-3 minutes because otherwise his truck is going to be flooded in.
• I tell Chris we need to leave like asap. He’s upset because he wasn’t able to pack anything.
• *At this point I’m just going to fast forward through these next bullet points to serve as a summary for me for when I decide to go more in detail*
• He opens the window, we leave stingray shuffle style with sophia in my arms.
• The neighbor makes unnecessary commentary from the floor above.
• We meet with Molly and squeeze in the bed of the truck (there wasn’t much space)
• It was cold and started to rain
• As we left the neighborhood we realize because we were down-hill, we got all of the flooding and everything was untouched.
• Christian says he left his phone on his bed when he opened the window.
• We’re now sharing my phone thats at 30%
• He calls his dad for him to make hotel reservations
• Molly drives us to her brother’s girlfriends house really quick but because there are so many animals Sophia is being annoying and loud and stressful. Molly says theyre going back to retrieve some items
• We get back and me and Christian stay in the truck with Sophia and when they get back they said they had to swim out and the National Guards are now not allowing people to go in.
• We ask Molly to drop us off at a pet friendly hotel and they did (im so grateful for them)
• Christians dad tells us that he got a hotel for cheaper and he’ll order us an uber. We walk to a wawa maybe a half mile away and sophia poops during this (idk why this was important to me i didnt want her pooping in a hotel so it made me happy lol)
• When we get to wawa its a split between experiences. you see college students unscathed by what happened then you have other college students who literally only have pants on and a draw string backpack who then said they had to swim out of their apartment.
• Goons
• Get picked up from wawa
• Christian tells the uber driver that 45 min drive is wayyy too far and his dad, the same dad that made the hotel reservation, mustve gotten the address wrong and christian directs him to a holiday inn thats a lot closer. when we get there, christian runs in, and comes back out a few mins later and guess what! the holiday inn is out of power! the uber driver was like im sorry i already ended the ride sorry and i had to leave the car so now the phone is at 1%.
• I start going car to car asking to borrow their charger just enough for me to download uber and order a ride for us. thankfully these two guys just let me have their charger (i already had a portable charger i just forgot the cord)
• I feed sophia
• I go to my contacts list and start at A and start scrolling. Annika! She lives in Orlando maybe shes still around. I call her and this is when I start crying. I tell her the situation and asked if she could drive us to the hotel and she said of course. She picked us up and dropped us off ily annika.
• by the time we get to the hotel its probably like 7pm. We’re STARVING! During hurricanes everything is closed so we hadnt eaten anything. thankfully there was one taco place open and only one postmates driver available. I tipped that man like 20 on the app and 50 irl bc i was so grateful for food.
• I hand wash our clothes in the sink bc its the only clothes we have and I dry it with an iron.
• I post on snapchat about everything and immediately my fraternity brothers (Theta Tau) came to our aid

Day after

• Andrea said she can take me anywhere and she wants to pick up supplies and chipotle for us.
• I send her a list and she gets all of it (im crying rn as I write this because truly I’m so lucky to have had all these people in my life) I need to stop writing now.

2 Days after

• My parents pick us up and take us to Port Saint Lucie (both of our parents live here)
• That night we go shopping for supplies like bins and disenfectants and ziploc bags to try and save whatever we could
• Another fraternity brother, Nicolas tells us that he has a spare apartment that we could use for however long we needed for free (I sent him some money though I couldn’t do that to him)

Three Days after – the recovery

• Me, Sophia and Chris drive back up and go to our brothers apartment then the 3 of us go back to the scene of the crime
  • I brought Sophia because my parents house is brand new like from the ground and she’s very attached to me; so that paired with they would most likely make her sleep on the floor or in the laundry room or alone in this scentless house, paired with the fact that she also just lost her home. Sophia is incredibly smart and that would be so unfair to her.
• We drive up to the window of our apartment, i left the car on with the AC on and window’s down for sophia (and of course she has a cup of water and a cup of food in the cup holder)
• Immediately you smell mold. musty earthy mold. the grass that was once green is now brown.
• We didn’t bring any keys with us because we left through the window so we just went through the window
• Before we went in we just opened it to let the air out. the smell was awful. our apartment had been marinating in mold for 2 days now
• We look at the walls and the furniture and everything is covered in mold
• we think there’s a bunch of poop streaks on the wall but it was just sophias kibble that was dragged down across the wall when the water was receding (I thought it was so funny)