Accounting for Debby in New Port Richey

Mary O'Benar, of River Ridge Road on a section of the Pithlachascotee River, gave us an accounting of some of the damage from Tropical Storm Debby in her area.

She wrote first:

 Upriver, the water is more than 3 feet higher over normal, and the end of this block is completely underwater. Across the street, one house has a broken window from a big tree limb, and flying debris broke a car windshield. My backyard is full of big ripped up tree limbs. Branches are covering the dock and have crushed part of the chain link fence.

My new neighbors  have the saddest damage-- they'd just this week installed a hot tub, very nice screen house and a great deal of privacy fence. The screen enclosure traveled 5 houses before it landed, plus their expensive new fencing is wobbling like a drunken sailor.

She followed up with:

It was worse than I thought, obviously a tornado hit in my backyard. Limbs ripped off trees by tornado had good-sized chunks torn out of them. One tree was ripped down to the ground and a couple good sized branch stumps were driven into the dirt.

A large Florida Cedar that's hung out over the river for at least 30 years is now uprooted and down in the water too.

Thanks so very much for neighbors that just showed up this morning and started shifting debris, some of those tree limbs took 3 and 4 people. My thanks to Mary Rabelo and Mike, Priscilla Chew and Alex, Roxanna and Kerolay, they really lifted some weight.

The City street sweeper's already been by-- this kind of destruction is a good illustration of why we need to keep our City brush pile program in place.

Here's photos of part of backyard, and that's Kerolay Briceno by our pile of collected brush. Karolay is my 13 year old neighbor who helped a lot with cleanup.