Hurricane Ian turned Orlo Vista into a lake.
When the storm stalled over Central Florida in September 2022, it dropped historic rainfall across Orange County, overwhelming canals, retention ponds and stormwater systems designed decades earlier. Entire streets in the west Orange County community disappeared underwater as residents scrambled to escape rising floodwaters in the middle of the night.
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County officials later classified Ian as a near “500-year storm,” with some areas receiving between 14 and 20 inches of rain in a matter of hours.
For Orlo Vista residents, the disaster unfolded with terrifying speed.
“It was like, ‘OK, this is bad’,” said resident Janae Buford-Johnson, who has lived in the community since 1989.
She said she experienced flooding before during Hurricane Charley in 2004, when streets filled with water and residents were temporarily displaced. But Ian was unlike anything she had seen.
As rain bands continued moving across Central Florida, water systems in Orlo Vista began backing up from the ground level. Buford-Johnson said she first noticed something was wrong when her toilet gurgled and water pushed upward through the bathtub drains.
“The next thing I know, water started coming up from underneath,” she said.
Soon after midnight, the neighborhood lost power. In darkness, floodwater crept through homes while residents struggled to understand how severe conditions had become.
“All of a sudden it was water. I’m stepping in water,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh, we’re in our tomb.’”
Within a short time, Buford-Johnson said floodwater had risen nearly 2 feet inside her home. She said she and her teenage daughter climbed onto a bed while she repeatedly called 911 as emergency crews across the county responded to hundreds of rescue calls.
“We’re not going to die today,” she remembered telling her daughter. “Calm down. It’s going to be OK.”
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Rescue crews eventually reached the neighborhood by boat. Buford-Johnson said responders had to force open the front door against the pressure of the floodwaters trapped inside the house.
“When they opened that door, the rest of the water came rushing into the house,” she said.
The flooding across Orlo Vista reflected the scale of Ian’s impact on Orange County’s stormwater system. Jeff Charles, operations supervisor for Orange County Stormwater Management, said crews prepared days before landfall by lowering retention ponds and staging emergency pumps throughout vulnerable areas.
“We pumped it as low as it could possibly go,” Charles said of the Orlo Vista basin system.
Even with pumps capable of moving 40,000 gallons per minute, the storm exceeded the system’s legal capacity. Nearby Shingle Creek overflowed beyond its banks, while water flowing from neighborhoods north of State Road 50 and State Road 408 poured into the same basin serving Orlo Vista.
“All three ponds were one huge pond,” Charles said.
The flooding trapped residents inside homes, submerged vehicles and left many families displaced for months. Buford-Johnson and her daughter escaped into freezing water before climbing onto the hood of a car to wait for rescue.
Since Ian, Orange County has deepened stormwater ponds in the area and repaired damaged pumps to improve flood storage and drainage before future storms. For residents like Buford-Johnson, though, the memory of Ian still lingers every hurricane season.
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“You can’t give up,” she said. “We’re going to be OK together.”