PALM VALLEY, Fla. – Canal Boulevard in St. Johns County was underwater for much of the morning and into the afternoon.
By about 6 p.m., the water had mostly cleared from the roadway, though a “road underwater” sign remained posted and standing water lingered in yards and along roadsides.
One neighbor told News4JAX off camera that flooding on the road is a frequent problem when it rains.
Long-time resident Tab Baer said the scene Wednesday morning was unlike anything he had seen in years.
“You couldn’t see any one inch of land out here this morning,” Baer said.
The closure of nearby South Roscoe Boulevard compounded the problem.
“They shut down South Roscoe, so it put 10 times as much traffic on this road,” Baer said.
Baer attributed the severity of the flooding in part to development that replaced the area’s natural swampland.
“Years ago, you had all the big swamps around here,” he said. “It’s all developed land now. So it’s different than when [Hurricane] Dora came through. So Dora might have put out a lot more water, but it had places to fill up first.”
Baer estimated the area received more than 10 inches of rain over the last several days.
“If we’d have just had five inches, five and a quarter, you wouldn’t have seen much of nothing for real long, but it was over 10 inches altogether in the last few days,” he said.
“We did need rain bad, we did. It’s been dry all summer, and it’s wet now, the ground saturated wet,” he added. “Even like right here in the front yard, it looked like a big old lake.”
Remaining water in the area is draining slowly due to elevated Intracoastal Waterway levels, Baer said.
“You can see the water over there still. But it’s because the drainage system can’t drain into the intracoastal because the water’s too elevated,” he said.
Emergency vehicles were spotted on Canal Boulevard throughout the day. St. Johns County Fire Rescue told News4JAX they ran a normal number of calls Wednesday with nothing out of the ordinary.
With more rain in the forecast, Baer said he is cautiously optimistic.
“I think it’ll be fine, really, unless we get it like we did again, but I don’t think we’ll get that much,” he said.
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