When FEMA approached Chad Merrill about buying his home on Saddle Club Road after Hurricane Sally, he didn't hesitate.
“It wasn’t a hard decision,” he said.
He recalled spending a long and terrible night in the house in September 2020 as the water rose around the house and eventually seeped in. The horror culminated in him being forced to watch his daughters sit on the fireplace as water lapped over their feet.
They asked me, 'Dad, are we going to die?'” he recalls. “After hearing that, the decision was very easy for me. I would have put a match on that place and burned it to the ground before I let anyone else live there.
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Merrill's home was the sixth on Saddle Club Road that FEMA purchased through its voluntary buyout program. It was the last on the street to be purchased and removed, and ironically the only one condemned for demolition after Hurricane Sally.
Bill Hayden moved into his home on Saddle Club Road in 1993, and it wasn't until a year or two later that he and his neighbors realized the neighborhood was prone to flooding.
He said neighborhood representatives sought out then-County Commissioner Byrd Mapoles about their issue. Although he didn't offer much help, Maples, seemingly curious as to why they had purchased homes in such a location, informed his audience that there used to be ponds in the area where people hunted ducks.
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“We wanted to know how an area that used to have duck ponds got permission to build houses,” Hayden recalls. “We knew we had him there somehow.”
Sally, which made landfall near the Alabama line on September 16, 2020 as a strong Category 2 hurricane, was a catalyst for change on Saddle Club Road, located in the Saddle Club Estates subdivision north of Pace in Santa Rosa County .
Thanks to Hayden's skills as a planner and coordinator, a strategy was developed to hopefully use the land released by FEMA to address flooding issues in the area. Three and a half years later, this plan, which calls for the construction of a 12-hectare pond in the middle of the neighborhood, is finally coming to fruition.
“It's a very vivid picture of how slow things can go. We've been working on this for a long time,” County Commission Chairman Kerry Smith said at the board's Dec. 9 Committee of the Whole meeting.
At the Dec. 9 meeting, board members agreed without objection to spending $4.2 million to excavate the detention pond, build cul-de-sacs on either side of it and install a new rainwater collection system. The deal was finalized the following Thursday at the commission's regular meeting.
Site & Utility LLC is contracted to complete the project within a year, but expects it can be completed in 120 days.
“I hope to have them finished before the next hurricane season,” Hayden said.
Hayden, who did not lose his home to Hurricane Sally like his former neighbor Merrill, still had to evacuate during the storm. He also lost three vehicles and suffered severe water damage.
He said he vividly remembered two different sounds as the floodwaters rose, each of which struck him as “the worst thing you would ever want to hear.”
The first, he said, was the croaking of the frogs, which grew louder as the rising water drove them closer. The second reason is the bubbling water that forces its way through the small openings in the house, called weep holes, which were actually installed during construction to allow drainage.
“At that point you have no choice but to pick up everything you can and get out,” he said.
Hayden, who has done a lot of GIS mapping and worked as a highway design instructor for the Florida Department of Transportation, designed a plan to utilize the land where homes had been removed due to flooding.
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“You can’t use it, you can’t sell it and you can’t tax it,” he said. “They can only hold water.”
Hayden said he submitted his idea for a six-acre pond along with a long list of his neighbors' signatures to a county commission petition and caught the eye of then-commissioner Bob Cole. It wasn't long before he met with the county administrator, assistant county administrator and county engineer, as well as Merrill, at his home to discuss his plan.
“I showed them all the material I had and what I thought was a good solution, and they came up with a better solution,” he said. “This is a good example of citizens doing their homework and working constructively with the district.”
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Smith, who had not yet been elected to replace Cole on the County Commission, also worked to support Saddle Club Road residents.
“I started working on it right after Hurricane Sally. “We had a lot of problems at the Saddle Club before Sally came in, but Sally brought the whole problem right in our face when we took steroids,” Smith said in December. 9 meetings. “It was a bad, bad situation during Sally.”
When Merrill and his family moved out of their home on Saddle Club Road, they didn't leave the neighborhood and all the bad memories that came with it behind, but moved right up the street. He said he was thrilled to finally see a solution to the area's flooding.
“I couldn't be happier. I love this neighborhood, that’s why I stayed,” he said.
At the meeting where the county approved spending funds on the Saddle Club Road drainage problem, Hayden stood and did something rarely seen at the Santa Rosa County Administration Building. He thanked the County Commission and county staff who worked with him to resolve the flooding problem.
He would later admit that building the retention pond had become a bucket list item for him.
“We are very excited and looking forward to the day the heavy construction equipment comes out and the excavators start digging,” Hayden said.