PALM VALLEY, Fla. \u2013 Canal Boulevard in St. Johns County was underwater for much of the morning and into the afternoon. <\/p>\n
By about 6 p.m., the water had mostly cleared from the roadway, though a \u201croad underwater\u201d sign remained posted and standing water lingered in yards and along roadsides. <\/p>\n
One neighbor told News4JAX off camera that flooding on the road is a frequent problem when it rains.<\/p>\n
Long-time resident Tab Baer said the scene Wednesday morning was unlike anything he had seen in years.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou couldn\u2019t see any one inch of land out here this morning,\u201d Baer said.<\/p>\n
The closure of nearby South Roscoe Boulevard compounded the problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey shut down South Roscoe, so it put 10 times as much traffic on this road,\u201d Baer said.<\/p>\n
Baer attributed the severity of the flooding in part to development that replaced the area\u2019s natural swampland.<\/p>\n
\u201cYears ago, you had all the big swamps around here,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s all developed land now. So it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baer estimated the area received more than 10 inches of rain over the last several days.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we\u2019d have just had five inches, five and a quarter, you wouldn\u2019t have seen much of nothing for real long, but it was over 10 inches altogether in the last few days,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did need rain bad, we did. It\u2019s been dry all summer, and it\u2019s wet now, the ground saturated wet,\u201d he added. \u201cEven like right here in the front yard, it looked like a big old lake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Remaining water in the area is draining slowly due to elevated Intracoastal Waterway levels, Baer said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can see the water over there still. But it\u2019s because the drainage system can\u2019t drain into the intracoastal because the water\u2019s too elevated,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
With more rain in the forecast, Baer said he is cautiously optimistic.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019ll be fine, really, unless we get it like we did again, but I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll get that much,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by WJXT News4JAX – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PALM VALLEY, Fla. \u2013 Canal Boulevard in St. Johns County was underwater for much of the morning and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":421942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2927,116,118,117,166540,5902],"class_list":["post-421941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-flooding","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news","tag-palm-valley","tag-st-johns-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/421942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}