In Tampa’s Palmetto Beach, residents swim to survive the dangerous storm surge

TAMPA — John Broderick, 42, couldn’t wait any longer for emergency responders when he was treading water and having trouble breathing at his Tampa home.

As the storm surge inundated the Palmetto Beach neighborhood late Thursday night, it appeared to be rising by several feet every few minutes, he said. It came too quickly. The water activated his natural gas lines, stinging his eyes and leaving him gasping for air as the flood reached his roof.

So he took his cat and swam.

The wind was so strong that it took him five hours to travel less than a mile, and the water was so strong that it tore his shirt off his body. Halfway there, he found an 8-foot-long metal boat tied to a trailer and cut it loose with the knife in his pocket, he said, climbing aboard and rowing with a shovel floating nearby.

He lives in evacuation zone A, but he didn’t think it would be like this. During Hurricane Idalia last year, the water only reached his porch steps.

“God gave me this boat,” Broderick said. “There were a few times when I thought that might be it.”

His family has been in the area and worked on boats for 40 years, he said. After that, he doesn’t know if they will stay.

“There is no one left in the neighborhood,” he said, adding that many people were forced to leave their homes. Broderick broke down his neighbor’s door when he heard them screaming and gave them a piece of Styrofoam to float on. He hopes they made it.

As he rested on a dry stretch of road on South 20th Street near the Selmon Expressway around 1 a.m., water flowed down the street like a river. Huge, dome-like Marathon gas stations were flooded and the air smelled strongly of diesel. Night shift workers at the plant stood on the street in waders and walked waist-deep to venture further down the street.

Using his last remaining phone battery, he answered a call from the Tampa police, who had finally arrived at his home and were looking for him. An officer told Broderick there were too many people for the department’s boat, but they would take as many as they could to Ikea.

Shortly before 2 a.m., Broderick’s father reached him after leaving his own truck at the end of the road when water reached his chest.

The two reunited, along with Broderick’s cat, who was named after Broderick’s favorite actor, Emilio Estevez. Emilio, wide-eyed and soaked, peeking out from a luggage rack.

Frogs chirped in the water all around the two men. They sat shivering in the dark on the back of a stranger’s pickup truck, waiting for the water to recede.

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