A stormwater pump tripped offline for 66 minutes on Oct. 6 and the Circle flooded again, with water pushing into businesses. The county now says the pump was not the cause. For the residents association president, that only makes his questions harder to dodge: clogged drains, troubled equipment, nobody to call after hours, and a permanent fix that is still years away.
—It did not take a hurricane. It did not take a named storm, a surge or a king tide. It took about three inches of rain on a Tuesday evening.
—On Oct. 6, as a stalled front wrung tropical moisture over Sarasota’s barrier islands, the streets of the region’s best-known shopping district went under again. Water came through the doors of businesses. A county stormwater pump on the key tripped offline at 5:42 p.m. and stayed down for 66 minutes. The head of the merchants association called the county’s after-hours stormwater line and got a machine. And the president of the St. Armands Residents Association spent his evening emailing every public official he could think of.
—By 11:31 the next morning, Chris Goglia had put the whole episode in writing. His bulletin to city and county leaders reads less like a complaint than a case file: what flooded, when, who was called, what was found in the drains last time, and a long list of questions that end the same way.
“I don’t know.”
—Sarasota County has since answered exactly one of them. It was not the pump, the county says. It was the rain.
—That is not the comfort it may sound like. If every pump on St. Armands can be running and the Circle still fills with water in a three-inch rain, then the neighborhood’s problem is bigger than one bad pump, and Goglia’s other questions have only become more urgent.
—The same corner, again
—Street flooding was reported at a couple of locations on the Circle that evening, Goglia wrote, including near North Boulevard of the Presidents and Madison Drive.
“This has been a repeat problem area,” he wrote.
—Multiple businesses contacted Rachel Burns, executive director of the St. Armands Circle Association, the merchants group. A resident contacted Goglia. Because it was after hours, the two of them emailed everyone they could think of who might be able to get the right staff on the problem.
—Burns sent hers at 7:50 p.m., according to emails reported by the Sarasota News Leader. The Circle was flooding again, she told the city manager, the county stormwater director and the city commissioners, and not from a hurricane or a high tide. It was rain. Water was entering businesses in multiple parts of the Circle as she typed. It had flooded the sewer drains and mixed with restaurant grease traps, she wrote, leaving a foul mess that was damaging property.
—Merchants, landowners and residents cannot afford more repairs, Burns warned. Leave the stormwater problem alone, she wrote, and the Circle will close and the tax revenue it sends to the city and the county will go with it.
—Goglia thanked the officials who answered that night: city commissioners, the city manager, the county administrator and the county’s senior stormwater manager all responded to one or both of them.
—That gratitude is sincere. It is also the point. A neighborhood that floods in a routine rain should not need to email two governments at dinnertime to find out whether anyone knows a pump is down.
Sixty-six minutes
—The first explanation arrived that night in a report from the county’s senior stormwater manager, Kari Holmes, which County Administrator Jonathan Lewis passed along to county commissioners and which Goglia quoted in his bulletin. All stations were by then operating as intended, she reported. Then came the catch.
“We had a pump 1 failure at PS 7010 at 5:42pm and it was reset at 6:48pm. We have had issues with this specific pump at this station.”
—A known problem pump. A 66-minute outage. Water in the street.
“Is that what caused the street flooding on St. Armands Circle?” Goglia wrote. “I don’t know.”
—The county’s answer: not the pump
—Two days later the county said no.
—In a statement to the Sarasota News Leader, the stormwater department said Pump 1 at Station 7010 set off an overload alarm at about 5:42 p.m., that the station’s second pump kept running, and that staff manually reset the failed pump by about 6:48 p.m. Station 7010, the county said, does not serve the part of the Circle near the Columbia Restaurant where the flooding was reported, and the pump trouble did not contribute to it.
—The county’s explanation is volume. Between 2.8 and 3.5 inches of rain fell in a few hours, the department said, sending a great deal of water into the system at once in a low-lying place. Staff took a flooding call for St. Armands at about 7:17 p.m. By about 9:30 p.m. the water had substantially receded, and by 10:45 p.m. only puddles remained.
—Read that timeline again. The pump was back at 6:48. An hour later, water was still coming through shop doors.
—So the county’s own account leaves St. Armands with two possibilities, and neither is reassuring. Either something else in the system is not working, or the system is working as designed and three inches of rain is enough to put the Circle under water.
—July all over again
—What makes Oct. 6 more than a nuisance is that St. Armands has been here before, and recently.
—On Thursday, July 23, a thunderstorm dropped about 2.2 inches of rain on the Circle in two hours at high tide. Sarasota County, which maintains the city’s stormwater system under an interlocal agreement, said afterward that a failed sensor had kept one of the Circle’s five pump stations from turning on. The sensor was repaired.
—One restaurant manager told ABC7 the water rose about 10 inches in 10 minutes. “It’s not the first time and it’s not going to be the last one,” he said.
—He was right, and it took less than three months.
—It was not even the only time that month. On July 30, the residents association sent officials a map marking every documented case of street flooding on St. Armands in July: Sunday the 19th, Thursday the 23rd in two places, and Thursday the 30th in two more.
—With the map came two requests. First, an acknowledgment that this is “a serious, repeating problem that is not outside the design specs of our stormwater management system.” Second, coordination with the county stormwater department to find the cause and perform whatever maintenance is needed.
“We see this as clogged drains and faulty sensors,” Goglia wrote, “not capital improvements that will require waiting years for the Resilient SRQ funds to be spent.”
—A sensor in July. A pump in October. Flooding both times.
—A seat cushion in the baffle box
—The association has evidence for the clogged drain theory, and it is hard to forget.
—On Sept. 18, a board member went before a joint meeting of the City and County commissions carrying a photograph of what had been pulled out of one of St. Armands’ baffle boxes, the underground chambers meant to trap pollutants before stormwater reaches the bay.
—It was a floral patio seat cushion and a wad of carpet padding.
—The association suspects both had been lodged there since Hurricanes Helene and Milton tore through two years ago.
“Could there be more seat cushions or other debris jammed into our underground stormwater pipes?” Goglia wrote. “Having observed the damage from Hurricanes Helene and Milton, that seems reasonable, but I don’t know.”
—Four truckloads on Lido
—There is a precedent next door.
—In April, Goglia wrote, the Orchid Beach Club condominium association on Lido Key reported that after years of asking, the county finally scoped the storm drains at the southern end of Ben Franklin Drive. They were clogged. Clearing them took two days of work and four truckloads of debris.
“Could this be why floodwater from just rainfall events has repeatedly not been draining from St. Armands streets?” he asked. “I don’t know.”
—The county says it has been working the problem. In recent weeks, the stormwater department told the News Leader, crews inspected 181 stormwater structures in the St. Armands area and completed more than 80 structure and pipeline cleanings. Residents saw the vacuum trucks in the days before the flood, and the county kept one stationed on the key as the rain continued Oct. 7.
—Goglia had already asked the obvious follow-up. Does that work reach the underground pipes that carry water to the pumps and outfalls? And if the crews had not just been there, how much worse would Oct. 6 have been?
—The uncomfortable version of that question is the one the county’s numbers raise on their own. If the Circle floods like this after 80 cleanings, what is still down there?
—A machine on the emergency line
—The most pointed section of Goglia’s bulletin is about what St. Armands used to have and no longer does.
—After Hurricane Idalia flooded the key in August 2023, he wrote, the neighborhood built a working relationship with the county stormwater team. Residents had the cell phone number of the county’s stormwater operations manager and permission to call or text him directly. He often already knew about a pump problem from the county’s SCADA remote monitoring system before anyone reached him. He would drive out to St. Armands himself and clear a blocked storm drain with a rake. And a temporary pump on a trailer was staged ahead of storms, ready to be hauled to the Circle if the permanent pumps failed or fell behind.
—That was the kind of response the association got in January 2025, when it asked for the Circle’s pipes to be inspected. Jason Brown, then the county’s stormwater operations manager, answered within a day and committed to cleaning and televising the entire system.
—Brown is gone. Burns told officials on Oct. 6 that his departure left her with no one to contact in an emergency, the News Leader reported. So she tried the county’s after-hours stormwater support line. What answered, she wrote, was a fully automated AI system.
“This is unacceptable for an emergency line,” Burns wrote.
—Since 2025, Goglia wrote, the operations manager position has apparently been vacant, and residents are being told to call 311.
“We don’t know who receives the ‘SCADA’ reports and how quickly they are acted on,” he wrote. “We don’t know if anyone is assigned to come out here with a rake to clear storm drains that aren’t draining. We don’t know if a temporary pump on a trailer is still being pre-staged in advance of storms.”
—Lewis, the county administrator, told Burns that night that an after-hours call to 311 will reach the right staff, according to the News Leader. He also said that after the last pump problem, the stormwater director adopted a policy of sending a team member out to check whenever the county learns of flooding calls or significant rain.
—That is a start. It is not a phone number, and it did not keep the water out of the shops.
—Wakes on a state road
—There is also the matter of traffic. The road through St. Armands Circle is State Road 789, the only direct link between the mainland and the south end of Longboat Key and the island’s hurricane evacuation route. When it floods, drivers keep coming.
—Goglia asked whether there should be traffic control, and passed along a note he received that night from someone watching it happen.
“As usual, I’m watching j—a– after j—a– fly down these streets in their vehicles, throwing all kinds of water up against the houses and the businesses,” the note read. “It is absolutely infuriating.”
—The money is real, and the deadline is 2031
—No one on St. Armands is pretending the long-term fix is cheap.
—In 2024, a June flash flood submerged the Circle’s pump control panels, Tropical Storm Debby dropped about 18 inches of rain, Hurricane Helene put five to six feet of water in the Circle and Hurricane Milton followed with two more. Businesses closed for days. Some never reopened.
—Last fall the city asked the county for about $24.5 million in federal disaster recovery money for a St. Armands resiliency and flood mitigation program, and the residents association warned that partial funding was unlikely to solve the problem. On Dec. 16 the County Commission approved $13.5 million through its Resilient SRQ program for high-capacity pumps, backup generators, discharge piping and hardened outfalls with check valves. Underground storage vaults and deployable flood barriers were left out.
—Ten months later, the project is still on paper. In July the county said it was still selecting a design firm, and its stormwater director, Ben Quartermaine, said residents could see improvements in place by the end of 2027. At the Sept. 18 joint meeting, Quartermaine said a contractor had been chosen and the scope of work was still being negotiated, the News Leader reported. Under the federal grant’s rules, the work must be finished before the end of 2031.
—Burns told officials on Oct. 6 that the Circle has had no updates on the project.
—Quartermaine has also said that recent storms have exceeded the level of service the system was built to deliver. That is exactly the claim the residents association disputes. Three inches of rain is not Helene. A pump that overloads is not Mother Nature.
—The storm that missed
—The rain did not stop on Oct. 6. A county gauge near St. Armands logged more than three inches in the 24 hours ending the next morning and another half inch the day after that.
—Then the Gulf produced a hurricane. Isaias formed on Oct. 7, grew into a major hurricane and came ashore near Destin on Oct. 9 as a Category 2 storm, hundreds of miles from Sarasota. That was two years to the day after Milton made landfall at Siesta Key.
—St. Armands got lucky. Luck is not a drainage plan. Hurricane season runs through November, the Circle’s busiest months are just ahead, and the only thing standing between its merchants and the next cleanup is a system that could not handle an ordinary Tuesday.
—What St. Armands is asking for
—Strip away the questions and Goglia’s request is modest. He is not asking for $24.5 million this month. He is asking for a phone number.
“We’d like to have a more collaborative relationship, or at the minimum, someone we can call directly, after hours, when there is flooding,” he wrote.
—He wants to know what level of service the neighborhood is supposed to receive and whether it is getting it. He wants the pipes checked for whatever else two hurricanes left behind. And he says the association is ready to sit down with city and county staff whenever they are.
“Let’s fix this,” he wrote, “or at least make things better than what we’ve got today.”
