SOUTH DAYTONA, Fla. — Almost a year after being hit hard by Hurricane Ian, dozens of South Daytona residents say they are still recovering.
Sept. 29, 2022, was a terrifying day for Alyse Kimmy, as her South Daytona home flooded during Hurricane Ian. She says 3 feet of water filled the house as she and her family watched their belongings float around them in an unimaginable situation.
Kimmy said they prepared for the storm by stacking sandbags three high all around their home’s exterior, but they never expected the unprecedented amount of flooding that hit the city. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s special Hurricane Ian report, the storm brought 21.29 inches of rain to the Daytona Beach area.
“We were sitting on top of the couch and the water was still halfway up my calf,” Kimmy said.
She and her family had to be rescued by boats top get out of their water-filled home.
When Kimmy looks back on photos from that day, she hopes she never experiences anything like it again.
“I just don’t want it to ever happen again,” she said. “It was a very scary moment in my life. I got that grandbaby here and my children and the dog. It was terrifying.”
The storm hit the South Daytona area hard, causing Kimmy and her neighbors to lose almost everything they owned.
“It’s pretty humbling when you wake up and you don’t even have as much as a toothbrush or a hairbrush and you’re wearing your son’s clothes because you don’t have anything,” Kimmy said.
“Nothing in my house is left except the refrigerator,” neighbor Eugene Ostrosky said. “It’s disheartening to stand there in water, looking around, saying, ‘Now what do I do?’”
The neighbors say they lost irreplaceable things, too.
“I lost all my childhood papers that my dad had given me before he died,” neighbor Greg Pellicer said. “A folder with pictures, the report cards, the letters to Santa Claus, gone.”
When Kimmy and her neighbors started the recovery process, they didn’t realize how long it would take.
“Just about every home in this neighborhood was flooded so the contractors were just booked up,” Pellicer said.
After the storm, Kimmy and her family lived in a camper for seven months as they rebuilt their home from scratch, repairing more than $135,000 worth of damage — and she says there’s still more work to do.
While most of her home’s interior is now complete, Kimmy and her husband are working to finish the outside. They are adding a waterproofer to their concrete exterior, in hopes of keeping water out if there’s a next time. They are also building a drainage system to keep rainwater from pooling in their backyard.
“I don’t think most of the people had any clue about what any of us have had to do and how bad it was,” Kimmy said.
Before the storm hit, Kimmy said she never really understood the effects of anxiety, but now, she said, she shakes all the time.
“The minute it starts raining, it gets worse,” she said. “You panic and you’re looking out the doors, out the windows, and there’s no sleeping during a rainstorm. It’s just that PTSD is real. I never realized what it could really do.”
Right now, Kimmy and her husband are still working on their house every day after work and every weekend. She hopes that once they finally get to a stopping point, they’ll be able to relax and enjoy their home again.
“I’m hoping once we get a break, we’ll settle down and learn to love our home again and love our neighborhood again and not panic every time it rains,” she said.
Reagan Ryan is a 2023 — 2024 Report for America Corps Member, covering the environment and climate across Central Florida for Spectrum News 13. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.