It’s been more than four months since Hurricane Milton flooded the Lake Bonny community in Polk County.
Now, they’re demanding an independent investigation into what happened.
Flooded streets have dried out in the surrounding communities, but neighbors said the problems are still here. Some people are still waiting to come home, and they want officials to fix the problem before another storm wipes them out again.
“We still have nothing done in our house yet,” Chad Smith, who lives in Lake Bonny, said. “It’s not going to be that far away before the rain start and that water starts rising. What — we got to be scared to death every time it rains?”
The City of Lakeland and Polk County are doing a watershed study, examining not only the city’s pumping system, but also broader water management strategies.
“If we were only studying that pump, we are just studying one symptom of a much larger disease,” Lakeland City manager Shawn Sherrouse said.
Neighbors have started a petition and believe that an independent study will find real solutions.
“We need to have a third party that doesn’t have a check coming from us to actually tell us truthfully what was broken and what needs to be fixed,” Jane Morsey said.
But, who would pay for it?
“We understand that there are grants out there, but it would be up to the city, the county, Southwest Florida Water Management District, all of those that are named to help come together to find out how that funding would happen,” Morsey said.
Neighbors hope to get the petition out into the community in the next week. They want to gather at least a thousand signatures before presenting their proposal to local and state officials.