New organization SAND pointing to major damage from Debby, Helene and Milton
Although much public attention has been focused on the Laurel Meadows community — north of Bee Ridge Road and east of Lorraine Road — in the wake of Tropical Storm Debby’s flooding in early August 2024, eight residents who live on Phillippi Creek well west of that neighborhood recounted to the Sarasota County Commission this week the devastation they, too, had suffered.
And Debby was not their only problem, they stressed. Hurricanes Helene and Milton demonstrated the urgent need, they said, for the county to pursue the dredging of Phillippi Creek to prevent future disasters in their area.
Although no commissioner addressed the concerns during the Jan. 15 regular meeting — which is typical during the Open to the Public comment period — county staff did tell The Sarasota News Leader that efforts are underway to improve the neighborhood’s situation.
“We are here to beg to get dredged,” Mari Koerner, the first of the Jan, 15 speakers, told the County Commission during the Open to the Public period at the beginning of its regular meeting, held in Venice.
“A hundred homes were flooded along Phillippi Creek, from U.S. 41 to Bee Ridge Road,” a distance of about 2 miles,” Jim McWhorter of the River Forest subdivision pointed out, referring not only to Debby but also to Helene and Milton.
(River Forest, which is located east of U.S. 41, includes Palos Verdes Drive and Carmilfra Drive, among other streets.)
The speakers were part of a new organization called SAND, McWhorter explained. The acronym stands for Supporters for Action Now in Dredging.
McWhorter told The Sarasota News Leader via email that the organization was established on Jan. 2; as of Jan. 12, it had 30 members.
Tropical Storm Debby “filled our channels with deep sand east of U.S. 41,” McWhorter explained on Jan. 15, showing the commissioners a photo of the sandbar blocking “the main channel, the north fork [of the creek] to the north. At normal tide,” he continued, “that’s half of the stormwater outflow.”
“We’re at the headwaters,” he pointed out. “We take everything from the whole county. … There are sandbars everywhere; the channels are filled.”
McWhorter stressed, “All the new sand is shocking, if you see it in person at low tide.”
During the storm surges that Hurricanes Helene and Milton produced, he said, “the higher the sand, the higher the flood.”
Although he is a licensed professional engineer, McWhorter acknowledged that he is not a hydrologist. Yet, he told the board members, “I can do math.”
His calculation showed that the Phillippi Creek outflow for stormwater — “if you assume a 7-foot surge” — is 35% blocked. “The re-dredging of the old channels,” he said, “would lower storm surge for all homeowners up to Bee Ridge Road by 4 feet.”
“Has anyone even ever heard of 100 homes on a tributary being flooded three times in two months?” he asked.
Presenting a graphic, McWhorter pointed out that, decades ago, Phillippi Creek flowed in a horseshoe pattern around the Phillippi Creek Oyster Bar. (Another speaker, Alec Jerrems, described the pattern as a “gooseneck.”)
Then, a number of years after Hurricane Donna wreaked damage in the county in 1960, McWhorter continued, a deep channel cut into the creek in that area enabled water to flow freely out of the horseshoe, and a bridge was built over the cut.
“It fixed the flooding,” Jerrems pointed out of the channel.
“The Phillippi Creek drainage area is huge,” Jerrems explained. “It runs from the bayfront all the way out past Lorriane Road. From the south,” he continued, “it runs from Clark Road to north of University Parkway. … And it all has to go through this little section of Phillippi Creek.”
Since the early 1960s, Jerrems noted, “There’s been 100s of subdivisions built and ditches dug and channels cut, and all that’s maintained.”
Yet, no maintenance of Phillippi Creek itself has been pursued, Jerrems said. “The creek needs to be thoroughly cleaned out and maintained. … There’s times you can walk across the creek without getting your knees wet.”
Another member of SAND, Lisa Temple, invited the commissioners to come to her home on Phillippi Creek, where she has lived since 2012. “You can stand in my yard and see how horrible [the situation] is.”
A sandbar behind her house, she explained, “is basically blocking the creek” from flowing into the main channel; it has recreated the gooseneck from the 1960s.
During Debby’s flooding, Temple added, she and her husband finally left their house. “We had to walk through water about three-and-a-half feet high” in the cul-de-sac where their residence stands.
“We’ve never seen anything like this, not the sand nor the water levels that we’ve seen,” she said. “For Helene, it was just unprecedented.”
“Please, please consider re-dredging [the creek],” Temple added. “I have, like, huge anxiety and stress thinking about the next storm season,” she continued, “because I just don’t see how this water is going to flow properly.”
Koerner — the first Jan. 15 speaker — told the commissioners that on Aug. 4, 2024, “I woke up in the middle of the night to 9 inches of water in my home. Of course, I panicked.” She lost everything in the lower level of the house, she added.
On Sept. 26, the day after all of her repairs had been completed, she continued, Hurricane Helene passed by the county in the Gulf of Mexico. “I had 24 inches in my home. It was horrible. Everything was destroyed” from her waist down, Koerner said.
Then, on Oct. 9, “Milton came through,” she added. That time, she said, she had 21 inches of water in her house.
Moreover, “The garage door was ripped open,” Koerner continued; she had been storing items in the garage until the repairs were completed after Helene’s damage.
“I’ve been living with my sister for six months,” Koerner said. “I’m trying to slowly move back into my house,” which has yet to be fully repaired after Milton. “It’s just been overwhelming,” she told the board members. “But I know the house will flood again. The creek is gone. It’s all sand level to my property.”
She added, “I am desperate for a solution.”
Frustrations among SAND members
In response to News Leader questions, McWhorter of SAND wrote in a Jan. 15 email that he and other residents sent their first email to county leaders on Nov. 18, 2024. No one from the county’s Stormwater Division and no county commissioner “has come out” to take a look at the situation, he added. “Not one County official has suggested a plan,” he wrote, but they are listening to a lot of us and thanking us for our concerns.”
The only person who has responded with action, to his knowledge, McWhorter continued, has been Sheriff Kurt Hoffman, who sent Sgt. Sam Lutz “to view the Creek for their marine patrols, on Monday of this week.”
McWhorter further explained, “I had seen on the County Stormwater site … that [that division’s] top priority is ‘reducing the threat of flooding.’ On January 7th, I made a call to the Stormwater Manager, Paul Semenec, who had one of his staff tell me that their department does not handle dredging the creeks.”
The next day, McWhorter continued, “I received a helpful call from Joe Kraus of Planning and Development [Services] stating that he is the liaison with [the West Coast Inland Navigation District] WCIND only, and has nothing to do with new County funded dredging projects or budgeting to dredge the creeks.” Kraus is the project manager of the county’s Environmental Protection Division.
Kraus “referred me to Jeff Devine [assistant director of the WCIND, which is based in Venice], also very helpful,” McWhorter added. Devine told McWhorter that the organization funds on the Sarasota County projects that have been recommended by the County Commission, McWhorter wrote.
He has learned, McWhorter continued in his email, that WCIND “has a plan to dredge the west side of the Creek to the ICW [Intracoastal Waterway],” to facilitate the Sheriff’s Office’s Marine Division patrols. He has been hoping that the WCIND board would consider expanding on that plan, but, thus far, no funding has been provided for that, he told the News Leader.
“All of our homeowners from [the Jan. 15] presentations are determined to go present [comments to the County Commission] again until someone finally offers a County plan to stop this new flooding of homes caused by Debby,” McWhorter added.
In fact, he said, they are preparing to attend the Jan. 21 county workshop that was scheduled last year, at the request of the County Commission, to allow county staff to report on its findings about the reasons that some communities saw unexpected yet significant flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Debby, especially Laurel Meadows.
What county staff is doing
In statements provided to the News Leader via email on Jan. 16 — in response to its request for information — county staff provided details about efforts that have been undertaken to deal with the Phillippi Creek problems:
“Planning and Development Services [PDS] staff’s involvement is limited to the creek’s ‘public waterway’ portion, which extends from about the [U.S.] 41 bridge to the ICW,” that statement began. “We have an arrangement with the West Coast Inland Navigation District (WCIND) to perform a feasibility study for this area using County Navigation Improvement Funds. PDS staff serve as the liaison to WCIND. Note that much of the study work was redone following the storms, slowing progress.”
The statement continued, “The work is mostly complete, but we don’t have a firm [date for its being finished]. Once the study is complete, we will need to take that back to the [County Commission] for action on construction. WCIND is managing the feasibility study contract.”
The Planning and Development staff also noted, “[W]e have had individual contact with property owners along the creek about the feasibility study but have not engaged in broader outreach to the community.”
Further, the Planning and Development Services’ statement said, “Following this season’s storms, WCIND, using emergency funds, commissioned a bathymetric survey upstream to Beneva Road. With this data, [the county Public Works/Stormwater Division staff] may elect to pursue work in the creek to address changed conditions.”
A second statement pointed out that, following the 2024 storms, the county’s Emergency Management staff “facilitated and provided multiple resources to the community following storms and flooding, including [the following]:
- “HOPE Florida [representatives were] brought to the area and [Florida Department of Children and Families] teams went into the community.” The HOPE Florida program was announced in Sarasota County during a press conference coordinated by the Governor’s Office, that statement noted.
- Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] Disaster Survivor Assistance Teams were brought to Sarasota County to assist with registration for FEMA assistance.
- Crisis Stabilization teams were deployed.
- County staff distributed plastic bins, fans and dehumidifiers to assist homeowners who had suffered through flooding.
- “Comfort and laundry stations were established in the area” along with a combined Multi-Agency Resource Center (MARC) and a Disaster Recovery Center (DRC).