It’s not every day you see cars abandoned in the middle of intersections because they were stuck in nearly a foot of rain water. However, it’s recently becoming increasingly common in South Tampa, and the flash flooding is causing a myriad of issues, especially for student drivers.
Fall is a common time for more kids to start getting their licenses, and they’re immediately faced with the difficult task of navigating through flooded streets and crowded intersections. Oftentimes you can’t even tell that it’s too flooded to drive until you’re actually stuck in the flooded areas.
“I was driving home from practice last weekend, and Kennedy was completely flooded and it took like thirty minutes to get one mile up the road, and then I drove into a dip and my car made this weird gurgling sound. I ended up having to call my parents to come and get me and I was only two blocks from home,” Alayna Hadley (’25) said.
Even if you manage to get off the road unscathed, flash flooding in general has been causing huge delays in everyday activities and with the lack of warning it can have immeasurable consequences.
“Well, my streets get really flooded like on Manhattan. One time when we were coming home from school, me and my brother literally couldn’t get home because we couldn’t get through the floods. We were going to get stuck, but we pulled off to the side and we had to wait for an hour until it settled down,” Samantha Rojas (’26) said.
Students are constantly getting stranded for hours at a time, especially with streets like Manhattan and Gandy getting flooded; popular streets students use to get home. Not to mention, the impacts the extreme flooding has on the buses, as school buses can typically handle no more than six inches of water before becoming unsafe to drive.
Even getting out of your car and walking away can be considered unsafe; as broken car parts, swept-up debris and sometimes sewage floats through the water.
“I was coming down Manhattan, and it was just really bad, and the whole skid plate under my car just got ripped off. I had to pull over into someone’s front yard and sit there for like an hour,” Grant Brill (’25) said.
With the new onslaught of electric cars, vehicles can sustain even more damage by getting completely totaled due to a small amount of water reaching the battery. With the electric car brand, Tesla, becoming very popular in Tampa the flash flooding can leave thousands of people stranded or in danger.
“I live like north of here [Robinson] but still in South Tampa, because all the roads up there are very old, the draining really really sucks. It has definitely changed plans for all of us. This year is one of the worst years we’ve had [for flooding], and I think the city of Tampa needs to invest more in drainage infrastructure there’s just a lot of mismanagement of funds going on, that could go toward more prominent issues like this,” Brill said.
