Vehicle damage may be on par with damage to buildings caused by the tropical storm’s flooding.
By Tyler Oldano
Original Air Date: August 9, 2024
Host: The damage caused by Tropical Storm Debby is a moving target as assessments are pouring in. A lot of things can go into that number — houses, personal property, landscaping — but a big part, possibly bigger than damage to buildings, is vehicle damage. Our Tyler Oldano reports.
Tyler Oldano: For homeowner Allison Werner, the water from Hurricane Debby covered her entire property.
Allison Werner: I still can’t access my driveway. And my entire property, which is about a half an acre, was covered in creek, muddy creek water. My pool, you couldn’t even see my pool. I couldn’t see my lounge chairs. The water was so deep and so dark, and it was everywhere.
TO: She lives near Phillippi Creek, an area which saw considerable flooding during Debby, one particular casualty from the flood were her cars.
AW: My cars are destroyed. I have a detached garage and the water was about three feet up the garage. My cars are … I have two cars. they’re definitely destroyed.
TO: When a storm approaches, vehicles can sometimes be overlooked when it comes to protection. During hurricanes, keeping vehicles safe is an important fact to consider. Carfax reported that three hundred and fifty eight thousand cars – most of them in Florida – were potentially damaged by Hurricane Ian. It’s not hard to see why. Cars are large, and unless there’s a hill or parking garage nearby, they can be difficult to elevate above the floodwaters. According to the National Weather Service, all it takes is a foot of water to float a sedan, and 2 feet of water to do the same for an SUV. Some areas around the Myakka River saw more than 10 feet of flooding at the storm’s peak.
For Allison, even adjacent streets at a higher elevation were still under water.
AW: There was no higher ground. You know, even if sometimes we move our cars to the road called Tanglewood, which is kind of adjacent to mine to get higher. Everything was covered.
TO: But what if you’re inside a car once the flooding begins? FEMA says it all depends on how bad the flooding is. If the water is rising within the vehicle, get out and seek refuge on the roof, but the easiest way to keep yourself safe is to avoid flooded areas entirely while driving. Not only can cars float away, they can get stalled as well. This happened to our own reporter, Ramon Lopez during the storm.
Ramon Lopez: So what happened in my case is I have a, Kia Soul, which is a mini SUV with about a nine inch, maybe 12 by 12 inch clearance, a ground clearance. So I drove out because the amount of water appeared to be only about six inches in front of my house, which is doable, but I got to a deeper spot where the water ended up being about 90in. And as a result, my car stalled out.
TO: Luckily a neighbor was nearby and was able to tow him out of the water. He later discovered that his car was largely working. He was then able to get it back safely to his driveway. Lopez says, however, that others weren’t as lucky. A woman tried to drive through 12 inches in a honda odyssey and stalled out as well.
RL: And we watched her get to a certain point on and we said, she’s going to stall out. And in fact, she did.
TO: The woman’s car had to be towed out of the water and onto a driveway, but unlike Ramon’s it didn’t leave unscathed.
RL: The car was there the next day, and finally a tow truck came and had to tow her to a repair shop to drain out the water that apparently got into her engine. And that could have been a rather expensive fix, but not as expensive if the car had stayed in the water for 24–48 hours — it might have destroyed the car. So she was lucky that we happened to be there, and I was lucky that I was able to restart my car, which is not normal.
TO: FEMA says that 6 inches of water is all your car needs to stall out. And it’s not just the engine. Water can also have a huge impact on your car’s center console and electronic systems. If the water gets in the fuel or inside the oil pan potentially messing with a car’s internals. All this adds up to a lot of damage during a storm.
From midnight to noon on Monday, the Sarasota Sheriff’s department had 402 requests for rescue come into the station. That number includes vehicle related rescues as well as house rescues as well.
For after a hurricane, experts say the next best thing to do is to take pictures of your car, and call your insurance company. They’ll be able to tell you what to do next.
Reporting from Sarasota, Tyler Oldano, WSLR.
WSLR News aims to keep the local community informed with our 1/2 hour local news show, quarterly newspaper and social media feeds. The local news broadcast airs on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6pm.