City Hall
Six days after social media lit up with video of standing water on South Palafox Street, Mayor D.C. Reeves used his Thursday morning press conference to walk reporters through what actually happened. He also made the case that the New Palafox project’s newly rebuilt stormwater system did its job.
By The Numbers
1) 12 to 13 minutes. That’s how long standing water sat on the block between Garden and Romano streets before draining, according to the city’s review. Reeves said his first concern in any storm is water intrusion into businesses, and on that count, he said the record is clean.
- “We had zero water intrusion, zero closures. Everybody was open for dinner on Saturday night as they normally would be,” Reeves said, adding that the storm hit with more intensity than Hurricane Sally.
“That was a storm that would’ve put water in buildings two years ago or a year ago, and it didn’t this time.”
2) One block, not five. Reeves said the city reviewed video from every block of the five-block New Palafox project and found standing water on only one—the block nearest Garden Street. The other four blocks, he said, stayed high and dry because their stormwater drains south through city-owned infrastructure. The one problem block drains north, into a pipe owned and controlled by the Florida Department of Transportation.
3) Infrastructure Added By New Palafox Project
- 93,000 gallons of new stormwater capacity added by the Palafox project—equal to one additional inch of rain across the entire project site
- 1,700 linear feet of new, larger-capacity pipe installed
- 44 new drainage inlets, up from roughly a dozen previously
Working As Designed
I asked Reeves directly whether the system performed the way the engineers intended. “That is correct,” the mayor said.
He also shared that the added capacity means the corridor is handling normal rain events better than it did before the project—and that nothing about Saturday’s storm changes that.
Why the city can’t just fix the one bad block. Reeves said the pipe serving that block belongs to FDOT, not the city, and the city has no authority to upsize it on its own. He said he was on a call with FDOT staff Wednesday morning about partnering to replace that pipe.
Not a new problem. The city has studied flooding at that Garden Street intersection three times since 2015—in 2015, 2019 and a third study now underway, expected to wrap in about three weeks. The first two studies reached the same conclusion: the pipe needs to be bigger.
- Reeves said the timing could work in the city’s favor, since FDOT’s Garden Street reconstruction project is moving east toward that intersection, and he pointed to a similar case in Bay County where FDOT recently agreed to upsize a pipe at a “generational flooding intersection” on a state road.
The mayor, who once ran a Perfect Plain on Garden Street and said he kept sandbags in the employee restroom, framed the episode as a chance to fix a long-standing problem rather than just play defense.
- “If we can turn that into lemonade and get better relief for all of those businesses on Palafox, that’s what we should do,” he said.