DEBARY, Fla. – Nearly 17 years after Tropical Storm Fay dumped more than 20 inches of rain on parts of Debary, many neighbors in the Lakeside area still hold their breath every hurricane season.
Last year, during Hurricane Milton, homes flooded again.
“I just hope the city has corrected everything,” said Mike Ingino, who owns a home on Lower Lake Court. “If we have a worse storm this year, or a combination of them, then yeah — we’re going to have a bunch of problems here.”
In 2008, Debary’s Lakeside area, including the Debary Golf and Country Club neighborhood, became a lake itself when Fay inundated the community with 22 inches of rain. Floodwaters swallowed driveways, garages, and entire lawns.
Longtime residents like Gisela Maxwell weren’t living there yet, but still feel the storm’s shadow. Maxwell didn’t know how bad the flooding was when she bought the house.
“When I found out later on, I said, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I doing?’” she told News 6.
Maxwell now calls the home her “forever house,” but remains deeply concerned.
“What I want to know from the city is: are they going to take care of us and not wait until the water is sitting here again?” Maxwell said.
In the years following Fay, the City of Debary made significant upgrades to protect the neighborhood, including the installation of two 85-horsepower pumps that can move 12 million gallons of stormwater a day. That water is pushed 4 miles away into a massive man-made borrow pit designed to store 500 million gallons.
“These pumps turn on automatically when the water reaches a certain height,” said Debary City Manager Carmen Rosamonda. “It’s all part of a gravity-fed system.”
But despite those improvements, the system failed to prevent flooding in 2023 during Hurricane Milton. The storm dropped 15 inches of rain in just five hours.
Rosamonda explained that the city was also surprised by additional stormwater pumped in from FDOT (Florida Department of Transportation), which wasn’t communicated in advance.
“After every storm, we learn,” he said.
The question many neighbors have: Why not drain the lakes?
Rosamonda said it’s not that simple. The city is regulated by the St. Johns River Water Management District. If they drain too much, crews risk killing wildlife and damaging the natural ecosystem.