EDGEWATER, Fla. — April 9 marks six months since Hurricane Milton made landfall as a Category 3 storm, leaving thousands of residents across Volusia County to deal with chronic flooding issues.

What You Need To Know

  • Hurricane Milton made landfall near Siesta Key, Florida, on October 9, 2024, as a Category 3 hurricane with winds of 120 mph, after initially reaching Category 5 strength

  • Six months after Hurricane Milton, neighbors in the Florida Shores community of Edgewater are still trying to recover

  • Since the hurricane, Edgewater city crews have been working on cleaning up canals and ditches to help the water flow through the neighborhoods

  • Interim Environmental Services Director with the city of Edgewater Sean Maroney says the chronic flooding was in part due how much rain Milton caused in short periods of time

Neighbors in the Florida Shores community of Edgewater are still trying to recover.

Sandbags still sit in front of Lisa Delaney’s home as a vivid reminder of what it was like preparing for Hurricane Milton.

“I’m not going to move them and then have to move them back again. They can stay there. I don’t like the way they look, but well, I also don’t like that my house is still in a bad condition from two years ago,” she said, referring to the impacts since Hurricane Ian.

Rain totals in Edgewater were between 8-10 inches during Hurricane Milton, flooding several streets.

When Spectrum News talked to her last year, she had to keep her belongings off the ground, in fear of the water coming in. Now she says she’s worried every time it rains.

“We’ve had flooding since then, just from a few inches of rain,” Delaney said. “If I move, what am I going to have to move with? Not a lot of money, plus paying off my SBA loan from Ian. And so, it’s going to happen again. I mean, there’s just no way that we’re not going to flood again.”

Her next-door neighbor Kimberly Penny knows the flooding pain all too well. She got water in the house during Hurricane Milton and is still working through repairs.

“It’s a process that’s ongoing. We were building back from Ian when Milton happened and we’re still building things, you know, we haven’t put a floor back down. We’re not going to, it’s too close (to hurricane season),” Penny said.

Hurricane season is less than two months away, beginning on June 1, something that Penny says she’s not prepared for.

“It’s really scary,” Penny said. “I have a daughter that’s reliant on machines, and we have to think about all of that now. With every storm, even the smaller ones, we’re having to literally lift everything up off the ground, throw the closet clothes from the bottom racks up on beds, and go to sleep at night and hope for the best. And if it’s bad, we have to pack up and we have to leave.”

Since the hurricane, city crews have been working on cleaning up canals and ditches to help the water flow through the neighborhoods.

Interim Environmental Services Director with the city of Edgewater Sean Maroney says the chronic flooding was in part due how much rain both hurricanes Ian and Milton caused in short periods of time.

“Between Ian and Milton. Those were two majorly intense storms that we’ve never had to deal with before," Maroney said. "We’ve dealt with major rain events before where we’ve gotten large, large amounts of rain, but never in such a short period.” 

According to the city, Florida Shores was developed before stormwater treatment rules were enforced in the state and the open water canals were originally constructed as mosquito control ditches. Houses were the built around the canals all connected by a grid of dirt roads.

In the 1990s, strict stormwater rules went into place statewide, and all the north-south roads in Florida Shores were paved. In order to comply with the new stormwater rules, an extensive network of dry-bottom retention ponds and swales were constructed.

These dry ponds were placed into most of the east-west roads in Florida Shores, with the roadside swales connecting the houses to the ponds. The system was engineered to hold a portion of rainfall within the swales and ponds and to discharge anything over that amount into the canals and out to the Indian River.

“Crews have been doing their active commitment to cleaning the canals, clean retention areas,” Maroney said. “We’re trying to look into some other areas of digging out some retention areas that were dug 30 years ago, trying to get those cleaned out… working through some of the harder hit areas.”

The city is expecting to receive their new stormwater master plan this upcoming fall. Maroney said that was a major $1.2 million project they were working on which will give them a guidebook on the issues they need to address in their stormwater system in the city.