Sitting just north of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport is a small neighborhood called Edgewood — a few dozen streets of tightly-packed suburban homes.
A close-knit community of smiling, working class people who aid each other.
This blink-and-you-miss-it corner of Broward County has become one of the hardest hit areas in a four-day stretch of torrential downpours and flash flooding.
Dozens of cars immobilized as flood waters reached above their hoods. Homes partially submerged and filled with anywhere between a few inches to whole feets of water.
Early figures show Fort Lauderdale, near Edgewood, received more than 2 feet of rain on Wednesday, after several days of heavy rainfall — historic amounts for a 1-in-500-year storm, the National Weather Service said.
Denis Menedez, a 32-year-old mother, just moved into the community three weeks ago.
A new stove ready for installation, a television with stickers still on mounted to the wall and freshly built furniture decorated her home.
After a hard day’s work she slumped into bed Wednesday and dozed off as a rain shower continued outside, thinking nothing of it. She awoke to her husband, Isain Lopez, telling her something she said she could never imagine.
“The water is starting to get inside,” he told her.
The pair, with the help of her 15-year-old son Santiago, began lifting all their belongings and furniture off the ground — but the water kept rising.
As inches turned to a foot of flooding, they knew it was time to evacuate. They stuffed what they could in the car and drove to a friends house a few streets away.
“I never expected something like this to happen,” she said in Spanish. “I haven’t experienced flooding like this before.”
The next day, the trio walked nearly the mile-long trek through their communities flooded streets to pick-up much needed belongings they left behind.
As she opened her front door, water spilled out pushing a small black and white rat into her flooded driveway.
Slipping into her entryway, almost falling, she solemnly slogged into the kitchen to begin transferring food from her fridge to an empty bag.
The living room and kitchen had at least a foot of flooding, with a clear-marked water line another foot above the surface.
She went to begin throwing clothes together, as Lopez and Santiago collected other belongings.
The family had no idea what their next steps would be or how long the flooding would stay.
“We’re going to try to recuperate something and look for where to live,” she said with teary eyes. “Three weeks living here and now everything we bought, we just started, is all gone.”
A few streets away, Erick Martinez, a 16-year-old student at Stranahan High School in Fort Lauderdale, spent the day kayaking with his small dog Estrella on roads that turned into rivers.
His home was flooded, and so was his uncle’s and his friend’s, when the torrential downpour swept through the neighborhood.
“It’s my first time seeing this place this flooded,” he said.
Romero Ramos was working when the rain storm hit Wednesday. The parking lot of his work began to flood moving everyone to head home to stem the possible coming damage.
What awaited him was something he’d never seen during previous bouts of showers.
“We arrived to our parking areas and the water was going inside the home — eight to nineteen inches inside,” he said in Spanish.
Ramos said he’d never seen it this bad and it was the first time water entered his home.
The next day, with flooding still inside and water staining the walls, he chose to see the situation with clarity and optimism.
“These are things that happen in life so we have to face this because who has the control is God and we can’t go against his will,” Ramos said.
He’s not sure what he’ll do next, as he hasn’t been in a situation like this, but hopes the water will go down so he can start to clean and rebuild.
Experiencing destruction and a tragedy, he still summarized what befell him and his community very succinctly — and with grace:
“That is how it is my friend,” he said. “The most important thing is that we are alive and life goes on….”
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