In many parts of the county the flood waters are gone but the damage remains. People who are still cleaning up want to know -- what went wrong? And what can be done to protect them if it happens again?
The water may be gone but it's certainly not forgotten and some people are angry over storm damage that they believe could have been avoided.
On Thursday in Shelltown, Michael Aranda was trying to sweep away the evidence of this week's floods.
“It looked like we had an outside pool or something,” said Aranda.
But it will take more than brooms for people in the neighborhood to forget.
Julio Rojano tried to fight the floodwaters, but he was no match for the water that ran over the banks of a nearby ditch.
“The flood was about that high, almost a foot. All the way to there,” he explained.
Julio Lopez is convinced the flood waters that ran through his neighborhood could have been avoided if city crews had cleaned out the concrete lined ditch behind his house.
“They were going nowhere so they got to go into the street. They got to go somewhere. So they go to the street and go through the houses and all that stuff,” said Lopez.
There are palm trees and other plants growing along the ditch. Neighbors say they have complained about it for years, but no one has ever come to clean it out.
81-year-old Josephine Felix says her family has called about the ditch at least a dozen times over the years.
“I'm going to try and clean a little bit of ditch and my sister is going to do that too because they have a lot of branches there,” said Rojano. “The city is supposed to do that but we call them and they don't come.”
The Storm Water Department says it's not just an issue of keeping out the overgrown plants, but also the fact that people use those ditches as dumping grounds.
