Tropical Storm Fay Floods Jacksonville

[Metro Jacksonville]

Tropical Storm Fay Floods Jacksonville



Tropical Storm Fay has left her mark on Jacksonville. Neighborhoods around the city are now struggling with extensive flooding.

Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/content/view/882

[TD*]

Wow, looks pretty bad... Here over in Tallahassee we got rain all day today, but I think we missed the brunt that Jax endured.

[Coolyfett]

Man....Jax has to build some kind of protection or something. These flood look a lot worse than last years.

[tpot]

Great Pics!!  Makes you really scared when you think what will happen when JAX gets hit with a real hurricane that is a level 3 or 4.............

[jbm32206]

What made it worse, was this darn storm just sitting and dumping all that rain. Not to say that the city would do well if struck by a major hurricane...in my opinion...we certainly wouldn't!

[Abhishek]

thats a lot of flooding. Wow!

[jbm32206]

Makes you think Venice...


opps....corrected typo 

[heights unknown]

Good gracious!  That's pretty, pretty bad.  Yeah, if a CAT 2 or above hit, Jax would really be in trouble; and especially if they are slow moving like Fay.  Y'all pray that you never get hit with the big one!  And if you do, hope and pray they skirt along at around 25 miles an hour vice 2 to 6 miles an hour like Fay.

Heights Unknown

[RiversideGator]

We have had absolutely no planning and no forethought going on for the past few years.

The Delaney Administration had a pretty awesome guy, Chip (Patterson?) who was supposed to be one of the best guys in the country for emergency preparedness working for them, but apparently hes gone.

We would be even more wiped out by a category 5 Katrina event than New Orleans was.  shoddy buildings, no planning, no sea walls, even a regular sustained bout of rain and we lost power for 1/8th of the residents.

With a little more windpower and some collateral damage, we would be screwed right proper, and there isnt even an ongoing process to prepare for it.

I found this out while trying to gather information for what would happen if the city had to deal with chronic flooding in the future if sea levels were to rise even incrementally.

We are making no plans at all.  We are not even making plans to make plans.

And thats not just because that right now, the Builders Association pretty much controls the political process in this town, and anything which would impede rapid development is discouraged, but primarily because we don't have any real vision or thinking about the future going on anywhere in the city.

BTW, Katrina was a Category 3 when it scored a glancing blow on New Orleans.  The problem there was not mainly wind damage but the flooding caused by the overtopping of the levees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina

[RiversideGator]

Also, in New Orleans there was the not insignificant fact that much of the City is below sea level.  That is not something which is true of Jacksonville.

[Steve]

Not to say that the flooding was insignificant, but it's not like every street flooded.  I live in Avondale (another older neighborhood), and had no flooding issues whatsoever.  The stream of water on either side of the street towards the drain was never more than two feet wide.

With that said, we need to figure something out in some of these areas.

[Midway ®]

Makes you think Vienna

Makes me think of Venice.

[jbm32206]

Makes you think Vienna

Makes me think of Venice.

Guess I was hungry or something....I corrected my typo...thanks...

[Steve]

no kidding Steve. And for the city as a whole.

Are you kidding that the place functionally collapses after a little rain?

With that said, I'd hardly call this "a little rain"  We got more rain than some places get all year.  There to me are two issues at play - the river spilling over, and unbelieveably bad drainage.  We tried to work Friday, but we had to leave because we would have been flooded in.  We are nowhere near the river, our street just served as a westside retention pond.  That to me is crazy.

In addition, in any tropical storm, the city is going to have to shut down, because of the bridges - this city frankly can't function without the bridges, which close at the minimum tropical storm force winds.  In addition, this storm was extremely hard to predict.  Look at the Weather Channel - 65 meterologists on staff and they missed about three times on the path of this thing, and nobody expected it to go so slow - had this thing gone at about 8 miles an hour (which is about normal for a tropical storm), it wouldn't have been nearly this bad - the city would have been closed Thursday, and back opened Friday.

[thelakelander]

no kidding Steve. And for the city as a whole.

Are you kidding that the place functionally collapses after a little rain?

With that said, I'd hardly call this "a little rain"  We got more rain than some places get all year.  There to me are two issues at play - the river spilling over, and unbelieveably bad drainage.  We tried to work Friday, but we had to leave because we would have been flooded in.  We are nowhere near the river, our street just served as a westside retention pond.  That to me is crazy.

In addition, in any tropical storm, the city is going to have to shut down, because of the bridges - this city frankly can't function without the bridges, which close at the minimum tropical storm force winds.  In addition, this storm was extremely hard to predict.  Look at the Weather Channel - 65 meterologists on staff and they missed about three times on the path of this thing, and nobody expected it to go so slow - had this thing gone at about 8 miles an hour (which is about normal for a tropical storm), it wouldn't have been nearly this bad - the city would have been closed Thursday, and back opened Friday.

We should have taken Norfolk's route and build a couple of our bridges as tunnels instead.