DAYTONA BEACH — Just a few weeks before the 2026 hurricane season begins, residents and business owners in the low-lying Midtown and Fairway Estates neighborhoods got some of the worst news they could imagine.
Three people with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came to the May 6 City Commission meeting to share results of two years studying how flooding could be reduced in those urban core neighborhoods south of International Speedway Boulevard. What local residents heard knocked the wind out of their hope for a solution.
Any solution to Daytona Midtown flooding will be expensive, study says
The basic problem with the Midtown and Fairway Estates neighborhoods is they sit in the bottom of bowl-shaped topography, and once unrelenting rain begins, water collects in those neighborhoods rapidly and drains back out painfully slow.
When water rushes down the Nova and Navy canals that meet on the western edge of Midtown, it just makes the flooding worse when the water spills over the canal banks. And drainage pipes that run eastward along the flat land don’t have enough of a downward slope toward the river to move the water out with any speed.
The Army Corps engineers were tasked with finding a feasible solution, and they concluded anything that would help would be prohibitively expensive.
They suggested the city pursue federal funds to buy out about 40 of the most flood-prone properties in Midtown.
“I know it’s bad news, and it’s going to take time to process,” Jim LaGrone, a project manager with the Army Corp’s Jacksonville District, told city commissioners.
Mayor Derrick Henry appeared a little shellshocked.
“Here we are tonight without the solution we wanted,” Henry said. “You have brought to us the worst news. Our biggest dream was we’d have a solution. If I said I was anything less than heartbroken now, I’d be lying.”
What else makes flooding in Midtown and Fairway Estates so difficult to alleviate?
One of the Army Corps engineers at the May 6 meeting said the Daytona flooding study was one of the most difficult he’s tackled in his 17-year career because the two neighborhoods that chronically flood are so flat and they’re surrounded by higher ground.
The challenge getting water to drain out to the Halifax River becomes even more difficult when high tide or strong winds push the river over the top of the city’s stormwater outflow pipes. The water trying to drain out gets pushed back by the river.
There’s also very little green space in Midtown and Fairway Estates to absorb rainwater, and many of the buildings there are older and have their first floors at or below street level.
The Nova Canal built about 100 years ago, and the Navy Canal built more than 80 years ago, were probably not designed to handle the amount of runoff that gets poured into them now, the Army Corps engineers said.
But for as much rain and runoff as the Nova Canal handles, it’s still well below the threshold of federal standards to justify paying for improvements.
In addition to chronic flooding, there is also chronic poverty in the neighborhoods east of Nova Road in Daytona Beach. Part of that poverty comes from having to rebuild and replace everything from appliances to furniture to cars every time a bad flood hits the area.
The Army Corps study analyzed the cost benefit of building flooding improvements, and found the federal government could be spending $10 for every $1 it saved local residents.
They looked at building storm surge barriers, raising canal berms and even turning the municipal golf course into a large drainage area. But each of those improvements would cost much more than the structures they would be saving.
Doing a limited number of buyouts of some of the properties that suffer repeated flooding could have a return of 50 cents for every dollar spent, and in some cases even getting a dollar back for every dollar spent.
They see that as the most cost-efficient solution, but it doesn’t do anything to help the hundreds of other properties that have flooded for many decades.
Could anything reduce the flooding in Daytona’s Midtown, Fairway Estates neighborhoods?
Anything the engineers recommend to the federal government for Daytona Beach would be competing with other more feasible and economically justified projects, they said.
“Best case scenario, we’re at the bottom of the list,” one of the engineers told commissioners.
The city could look at widening the Nova Canal ditch, but it couldn’t be dug much deeper because the water table is so high. It’s also owned and controlled by the Florida Department of Transportation.
The city could look at installing larger drainage pipes in Midtown and Fairway Estates, but the Army Corps engineers don’t think that would help enough to justify the expense. More pumps could help.
They looked at adding gates at the canals, but the city doesn’t have enough flow to qualify for federal funding.
The best solution they found was to divert the water to the municipal golf course and build 15-foot-high levees there, but that would cost $100 million to $200 million, they estimate. The federal government is unlikely to hand over that much money, and the city doesn’t have that amount.
Henry said he had hoped the city could spend about $75 million over 30 years on whatever solution would be chosen. But it’s looking like there won’t be a solution anytime soon.
The city could pursue another flooding study looking at more of the area for a more comprehensive analysis, but another study would cost more money.
LaGrone said those doing the study “tried every step of the way” to overcome the low elevation problem in Midtown and Fairway Estates, but couldn’t get around it.
County government officials have already started talking to the city about solutions.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Study: No easy solutions to fix flooding in Daytona’s Midtown
Reporting by Eileen Zaffiro-Kean, Daytona Beach News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
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