Levy County homeowners dealing with severe flooding

Some Levy County homeowners are dealing with hurricane proportion flooding after 19 inches of rain fell in a week.

We caught up with one homeowner who can barely make it across her lawn the water is so deep.

TV20's Landon Harrar reported "I met with a family that is so flooded in trying to get down this road to where they're home is I couldn't take my news car, it simply would have floated away. They had to come to pick me up in their own personal truck because the water is so high, and it still reached to about the door on the truck."

Levy County Emergency Management's Director John MacDonald says this is the worst rainfall related flooding he can remember after more than 20 years on the job. "This was basically a hurricane without the winds, the rain amounts that we've seen this 19 inches there hasn't been historically any data that I've found since the 1950s with basically 19 inches of rain in 3 days."

Near Cedar Key, homeowners along County Road 347 which was closed most of the week are dealing with intense flooding. Some saying the drainage problems they asked to be fixed after Hurricane Hermine in 2015 never got addressed and so they're literally back in the same boat.

Stephanie Hart's entire front yard is under more than a foot of water and she said, "there are a lot of people right around this area that are totally submerged just like us, it's not just us, so it's a lot of people. I don't know the number I would think at least a couple of hundred and they're in situations like this where we couldn't get out on Friday because the water was just too deep."

MacDonald says crews are trying to assess damages to apply for FEMA assistance, while Hart says she's hoping this time around they can get some culverts installed somewhere to help prevent this in the future. "It's really scary and for the other people that live out here too the elderly or those that cannot get around. Luckily I'm able to walk and my husband is able to walk but the people that can't or have a car, you can't get out in a car so access is very scary."

Tv20's Landon Harrar reported "now Stephanie told me after Hurricane Hermine, the last time she can remember such a large flood, it took about 30 days for all the water to disappear. She says she thinks there's more water here now and that it's probably going to take even longer until her front yard is no longer a lake.