Tarpon Woods residents watch waters rise

Late Monday morning, a FOX 13 camera watched Clayton Lynch stall out in high water at the edge of Tarpon Woods, and he had to push his BMW out the rest of the way. So he was there to help a woman who missed a turn into a bank's driveway and went nose-first into a ditch.

"I was like, 'Are you ready?' She said yeah and I just ripped the door open and I helped here out and I grabbed the purse and made sure it didn't get wet," he recalled.  "It was pretty hard [to get the door open].  Somebody of her age probably could not do it."

She was OK.  We found another victim deeper into the subdivision and saw a lot of underwater side streets -- for the second time the past few days.

"What surprises me is how fast this is going down from the center," Doug Collett observed.

Another resident parked at a shopping center and walked in.

"Well I'm going to walk the road just to see how deep the water is to see if I feel that I can get my SUV through there," one man said as he trudged along.

A bus under escort plowed slowly through the water to ferry anyone out that needed out. 

"Yes it's about two and a half feet back there," Scott Shoemaker recalled.  "We were down at the bumper at some point in time.  It was terrible."

The county did open a shelter for Tarpon Woods residents.  But those we spoke with planned to stay put.

"It's annoying, and it's scary because I don't want it in my house, but what can you do?"

By early afternoon, the rain stopped and once again the streets were slowly draining.  But as in most places around the Bay Area, the swales and retention ponds are full and the ground is saturated, so any additional rainfall will cause more problems.