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A local plumber on why the cheapest defense against storm flooding has to go in during calm weather, not after the first warning
SARASOTA, FL — Hurricane season opened June 1, and almost every warning residents are hearing this month points up and out: how high the surge could climb, which evacuation zone they live in, how far the water reached last time. Sarasota County even planted bright measuring poles on Siesta, Manasota and North Jetty beaches so people can stand next to one and see what a serious surge actually looks like.
The crew at Bullseye Home Services, a local plumbing and sewer company, says a fair amount of the flood damage they get called to clean up never came over a seawall. It came up the pipes.
When Hurricane Debby stalled over the county in 2024, county officials estimated about a thousand homes took on water. Along Phillippi Creek, it happened three separate times in one season. In the Laurel Meadows subdivision, some families ended up measuring the waterline on their walls in feet. Much of that was rain and runoff. Some of it was not.
“People picture floodwater coming through the front door,” said Joshua Chastain, General Manager at Bullseye Home Services. “A lot of what we see is the toilet and the shower filling up from the bottom. When the system out in the street has nowhere left to put the water, your house is where it could push back into.”
This is the part that never makes the forecast. In some of the older neighborhoods around Sarasota County and Southwest Florida, stormwater and sewage could move through the same lines. Drop a few inches of rain an hour on top of a high tide and those pipes fill, and the pressure has to go somewhere. Often the easiest way out is a drain inside somebody’s home. The water that comes up that way is not the kind you mop and forget about.
There is a fix, and it is neither new nor expensive. A backwater valve sits on the main sewer line and works like a one-way door. Waste flows out the way it should, and when water tries to push back in, a flap drops and seals the line. Plenty of homes in flood-prone parts of the county already have one. Plenty more do not, and the owners have no idea until the day it matters.
“The catch is timing,” Joshua Chastain said. “We can’t put one in while the water is already rising. It is a dry-day job. The week to think about it is the week when nothing at all is going on.”
A few things homeowners can check on their own before a storm is anywhere on the radar:
- Find the main water shutoff and actually turn it. In older Sarasota County and Southwest Florida homes the valve is often corroded or painted over, and a storm night is a bad time to learn it won’t budge.
- Test any sump or sewage ejector pump, and ask whether it has battery backup. When the power goes, an electric pump stops, and that is usually when the rain is heaviest.
- Take note of which drains sit lowest in the house. Those are the ones that back up first, and the ones a backwater valve is meant to protect.
- After saltwater flooding, have older metal supply lines looked at. Salt keeps corroding pipe long after the water recedes.
None of this replaces an evacuation plan or flood insurance, and the Bullseye crew is quick to say so. The forecast this year from the Sarasota-based Climate Adaptation Center calls for twelve named storms, five of them hurricanes. Whether the season turns out busy or quiet, the advice underground does not change.
“We would rather talk to somebody in June about a valve than in September about their floors,” Josh Chastain said. “One of those conversations is a lot cheaper than the other.”
About Bullseye Home Services
Bullseye Home Services is a locally owned plumbing, drain and sewer company serving Sarasota County and the surrounding Southwest Florida communities. The company handles residential plumbing repairs, water heater work, drain cleaning and sewer line repair, including trenchless pipelining that fixes failing lines with little or no digging. More information is available at https://callbullseye.com/.
Media Contact
Joshua Chastain
General Manager, Bullseye Home Services
(941) 200-6424
440 N Tamiami Trail
Osprey
Florida
United States
(941) 200-6424
Release ID: 89195402
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