Longwood community sees flooding after woman fills drainage pipe with concrete

LONGWOOD, Fla. – Robin Rodriguez — an HOA board member in the Shadow Bay community in Longwood — said she is afraid flooding will become normal in their neighborhood.

Back in March, Rodriguez and other neighbors received a letter from a homeowner who asked not to be named. 40cr Fine Drawn Seamless Steel Pipe

Longwood community sees flooding after woman fills drainage pipe with concrete

The homeowner accused the HOA of installing a drainpipe on her property without her permission.

She also asked for compensation.

She wrote in part, “I advise you of this because once I close that pipe off, you will have a drain problem that will back up on the road and on your property and potentially on my property.”

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Fast forward to April — that homeowner hired a crew to fill the stormwater pipe on her property with concrete.

The community now worries that without that functional pipe, they’ll see widespread flooding after a hard rainfall.

They imagine it will be even worse if a hurricane were to hit Central Florida.

“Impassible, absolutely — no vehicle no person would be able to get through it. You’d have to get through it with boats,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said that back in the 1980s, a developer separated the houses on one side of the street from the HOA.

The developer then created an easement to run a drainage pipe between these two homes that flows out into a retention pond.

Rodriguez said the HOA is not responsible for that.

The homeowner said a boundary survey was conducted that showed there was no pipe on her property originally, but her title commitment showed there was.

“In addition, as the treasurer, I can tell you that there is nothing in our records from that time or any other time that says that we ever paid a crazy amount of money to put a 110-foot pipe in the ground, and there would be financial records for that,” Rodriguez said.

The homeowner emphasized that the easement on her property is not the HOA’s, and they don’t own pipe.

“It’s her property. She can do what she wants with it, but you have caused catastrophic flooding for your neighbors,” Rodriguez said.

News 6 reporter Treasure Roberts spoke with the homeowner, who filled the pipe off-camera.

She said water draining from the roads onto her property was causing a sinkhole to form.

She couldn’t provide written confirmation that officials said a sinkhole was forming, though.

Seminole County is currently investigating all options with the HOA to bring the project to code. A representative for the county said ultimately this is a private property/roadway, and the county is not responsible for funding the repairs required to remedy the situation.

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Treasure joined News 6 at the start of 2021, coming to the Sunshine State from Michigan.

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