TOWN N' COUNTRY, Fla. — For some residents of Town ’N Country, heavy rain no longer just means wet roads and puddles. They say it means waist-deep flooding in their yards and even canoe trips down their driveways.
“The last couple of years it’s getting worse and worse,” one resident wrote in a message to Tampa Bay 28 on Sunday. “It has rained for two days now and houses are flooding as well as cars. My mother is 85 years old and scared to stay in her own home. There are many elderly people here on this street and other streets who are scared. We all have called the county and they have done nothing to help.”
WATCH: ‘Here we go again’: Town ’N Country residents say flooding getting worse
The resident, who lives near Sweetwater Canal, said their mother’s home has repeatedly flooded.
“My mom’s home has been flooded as well as neighbors in the last couple of years,” he said. “This needs attention from you guys to maybe help the county do something about it. It flooded now and continues to rise also.”
When Tampa Bay 28 reporter Jada Williams visited the neighborhood the next day, it was sunny at first. But as she spoke with neighbors, heavy rain began to fall again, and flood concerns started all over.
Austin Freeman, a Production Manager at Sweetwater Organic Community Farms, who has worked in the area for about four years, said the rain is always a worry.
“The worry is it lasting more than, like, an hour or two,” Freeman said. “If it’s only 10, 15 minutes, things aren’t that bad. If it’s more than an hour, I mean, it gets knee-deep pretty quickly, especially if it rains after another rainstorm. You know, if it rains in the morning, and then a few hours later, it rains heavily again, we’re almost like guaranteed to have, like, knee-deep water, like at minimum near the front gate.”
The flooding affects more than just the road.
“Our chicken coop gets flooded really, really bad, so about, like, waist deep,” Freeman said. “We’ve done things to kind of give the chickens platforms and other places to sit and eat and have dry food. But it also means no one could go in there to shut the door. They’re susceptible to raccoons and stuff overnight. They could obviously drown themselves. All of our crop fields, all those get drowned, seedlings get washed away. I mean, we basically have to reset everything after, like, a big flood. And a big flood is really just like a three-, four-hour rainstorm.”
Freeman said it hasn’t always been this way.
“Really, just the past year and a half, we’ve really seen it get bad,” he said. “Last summer, it was really, really bad. Just a regular rainstorm basically brings, like, a river through the middle of the property. We would see fish swimming through it. Sometimes the creek would flood. But now it gets to the point where, like, the creek isn’t even flooded yet … and our property is still being flooded before the creek even gets there. It just continuously [is] getting worse.”
Another neighbor, Kevin Kerrivan, said his family has lived with the same frustrations.
“Oh yeah, no, it’s always like that,” Kerrivan said of the flooding. “Always, even like on a day like today, it’s starting to flood. It let down a little bit yesterday, but it’s starting to … every year it gets worse. The little bridges down there, the creek that goes below, it’s probably about three feet higher than usual. So it’s pretty wild.”
He said the water can quickly reach thigh-level.
“So when Milton hit it actually flooded what we consider our living room, but it’s kind of like a mud room, so we had to rebuild that entire room. So it gets pretty high. The farm floods. These two houses at the end of the right, they flood dramatically.”
Even moderate rain can mean big problems.
“Any big rainfall … even though yesterday I don’t think it was like a trench downpour, but it floods bad,” Kerrivan said. “We only have one drain down at the end. So we’re hoping to get with the city to kind of get it worked out.”
Kerrivan tells us his girlfriend has filed tickets with the city, but he said responses are slow.
“They kind of get kicked back,” he said. “So she actually put in one today, because she was like, ‘Oh man, it’s been raining all morning, and we’re already starting to pick up water, so it’s going to be a rough, rough season for us.’”
He said flooding wasn’t always this frequent.
“From when I was here in 2009, 2010, it would flood during, like, the hurricane season,” Kerrivan said. “But now it’s like even just a little bit of rain, it piles up pretty quick. So I think it’s gotten worse over the last 10 years, for sure.”
His family has even had to rely on canoes to get out. He showed photos of his girlfriend’s mother paddling through the driveway.
“She actually canoed from basically the entrance of the house down to the end of the street,” he said. “It is really odd to own a canoe and you have to canoe from your driveway.”
The neighborhood is near Sweetwater Creek, which is maintained by the state, and Henry Canal, which is maintained by the county.
As neighbors point fingers at potential upstream construction or canal issues, Hillsborough County said it is already working to address the flooding.
Hillsborough County officials say they are working to improve stormwater flow in Town ’N Country after repeated flooding concerns.
The county maintains about 20 miles of canals in the area, which help move water from neighborhoods into Tampa Bay. Crews have been clearing debris and repairing sections of the canal system since last year’s hurricanes.
In a statement, the county said the recent flooding followed “about 9 inches of rain over a 72-hour period” on already saturated ground.
“Residents can expect to see standing water in the streets during hard rains,” the county said. “As the rain subsides and particularly as the tide goes out, those water levels will drop again.”
More on the county’s canal project: Inside Hillsborough’s massive effort to repair Town ’N Country’s canal system after 2024 hurricanes
In a statement, the county said the Town ’N Country area saw about nine inches of rain over 72 hours as of Monday morning.
“This low-lying area of the county uses a network of about 20 miles of canals to help move stormwater through the neighborhoods to the Bay,” the county said. “The county has been hard at work all summer maintaining those canals and working to keep them free of trash and debris. After a summer of typical rainfall, the ground in this area is saturated and heavy rains like the ones this weekend will stress the stormwater systems. Residents can expect to see standing water in the streets during hard rains, and as the rain subsides and particularly as the tide goes out, those water levels will drop again.”
Still, residents like Freeman worry that help is coming too late.
“I guess it makes me feel better — better late than never, right?” Freeman said. “But I also wonder, like, I wonder if they were working on the canals last year, the years prior … maybe something they did made it better in one area and worse in our area. I really don’t know, but I hope something gets figured out soon, before this is new normal.”
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