PUNTA GORDA, Fla. — In Punta Gorda's Historic District, people are still drying out their homes with fans and working to get back to normal after Idalia.
"Let me put it this way, I got concerned, at my age being scared is one thing... but concerned is another because you don't know what the hell you're gonna do," Punta Gorda resident Al Whitworth said.
He said once the storm began, people could see waves coming down the street. Hurricane Idalia flooded part of his home and the engine of his car.
"The water was up to half of the front wheel, that's what caused the problem," Whitworth said.
Mike Polk lives close by and told a similar story, pointing out flooding that came to the caps on his Ford truck. He and his wife spent the morning of Idalia deciding whether or not to leave town.
"I got up at 2:30 a.m. I looked outside and it was just little puddles... nothing much. Then I went back to bed. My wife got up, and she looked outside and she said, 'We're surrounded by water,'" Polk said.
They decided to pack up and leave for a few days, checking in on the house through their cameras.
"Since they've done the work at [Gilchrist] park, it just doesn't seem like the water drains as well," Polk said.
Polk thinks the flooding and drainage speed is an infrastructure issue. Wednesday night around 7 p.m., there was still more than a foot of water on Trabue Avenue, just three blocks off the Peace River, while downtown had dried out hours prior.
"I'm a regular at city council meetings, you know, they've got to get it right," Polk said. "They want to do all this development downtown, and we don't have the infrastructure that can support the existing development that we have."
