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Recovery efforts begin after damaging storms
Kailey Tracy reports
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Several communities cleaned up Wednesday after Tuesday’s severe weather.
One of those communities included residents at an apartment complex near 6th Street South in St. Petersburg where the National Weather Service said an EF-0 tornado touched down around 4:20 p.m. Tuesday.
Wind gusts reached 82 miles per hour and ripped part of the roof off of one building and tore down powerlines. No one was injured.
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"I was terrified," resident Colon Thomas said.
Thomas was getting back from the store when he witnessed the wind rip the roof off of his building.
"I never experienced that before," he said. "I was programmed for floods. As you already know, we are in a low area here because when the hurricane came through before, this whole place got flooded out here and everything. So, we had sandbags left over from that. But I started seeing the sparks and everything got dark and then boom. I just heard something loud and that was it. I was terrified. By the time I came to my senses it was over."
He sat in his car as debris and powerlines fell around him.
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"It happened so fast. It happened so quick. I knew it wasn’t a hurricane, and I knew it definitely wasn’t a flood, you know, because everything was in the air," he said.
Thomas and his neighbors were still recovering from extensive flooding from Hurricane Idalia when this storm and December’s storm hit. He said there are several leaks in his building from Tuesday’s storm that are causing water damage.
The building next to his doesn’t have power.
"All of the lines right there were on fire," Myra Austin, who lives two buildings down from Thomas, said about the powerlines.
"You could see the fire going back and forth, back and forth. It was like a light show," she said. "It went so fast. It's like, ‘woo woo. Click, click, click, click, click.’ Like a train, ‘boom, boom, boom, boom, boom’ and then the fire, and then the power went out," Austin said describing the tornado.
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Her apartment was okay.
"You don’t think a tornado is going to hit so close to you like that, and it could have easily came right here by us, you know what I’m saying? We are right at the next apartment over," Austin said.
Austin and Thomas, though, said they’re grateful this storm wasn’t even worse.
"Thank God that everybody is safe. It’s a blessing," Austin said.
St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch toured the damage Wednesday and met with residents. He said crews were out across the city Wednesday assessing damage.
"The city has done well," Welch said. "I think our preparation helped us avoid the level of flooding that we were seeing in some neighborhoods in the past, you know, really aggressive drain inspections, kind of innovative use of some pumps in certain neighborhoods. I think it paid off. The tidal rise wasn't as much as we experienced back in December."
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Welch said crews delivered sandbags over the weekend to areas that are prone to flooding, cleared out drains and made sure the infrastructure was at 100% capacity. He said everything they did prior to this storm will now be standard practice moving forward.
"This extreme weather is not going to go away, and we'll see more of these kind of out of hurricane season storms that have this kind of impact. So, we need to be proactive in terms of what we do in terms of maintenance and infrastructure," Welch said. "But folks also need to be aware of the changing climate and the impact of sea level rise. We want to have that conversation, talk about how we can adapt and how we mitigate, and what help we need from our federal and state partners to make that happen."
"In terms of our planning, in terms of our infrastructure, where we want density and growth to happen, that's all got to be integrated," Welch said. "It’s not anything to be afraid of, but we have to engage it, not for us necessarily, but for our children and their children 50, 70 years from now. The decisions we make right now will have an impact on how you can live in St. Pete, in Pinellas County."
FOX 13 reached out to the property management team for the complex on 6th Street South regarding a timeline for repairs. As of the time this article was published, we hadn’t heard back.