Throughout Broward County Tuesday, everything seemed to be getting back to normal, said Miguel Ascarrunz, assistant director of Broward County's Emergency Management Department.
Most of the standing water had receded, tree debris had been cleaned and city employees were back on regular schedules.
“We haven't gotten any calls that were urgent or of eminent threat today,” said Ascarrunz.
All county services have resumed to normal schedules. Odette Brown, the education program manager for the county's solid wastes and recycling services, said residential tree debris will be handled through regular bulk pick-ups.
“Debris was minimal,” said Brown.
Although Isaac caused isolated floods in Pembroke Pines and Lauderhill, city officials reported Tuesday that those areas had largely drained.
In Pembroke Pines, public works crews spent Monday and Tuesday removing storm debris from street drainage grates, and cleaning up fallen trees and palm fronds.
The city experienced some isolated street flooding from Isaac’s rains, said Shawn Denton, public works director, but “Not anything I would call significant flooding.’’
“It was random,’’ Denton said. “Some random streets where swales or drains got clogged, in some cases we had to shovel it out.’’
Heavy rains that fell Sunday night through Monday caused canals to surge and some trees to fall, their roots loosened in the saturated ground, he said.
Garbage collection was not disrupted by the storm, Denton said, and will continue as scheduled.
“This was a good practice,’’ Denton said of the storm, “good to get ready for, good to watch, but we sustained no real damage.’’
In Lauderhill, the city’s northwest section reopened Tuesday after police restricted access to residents only following isolated floods, said Capt. Rick Rocco of the Lauderhill Police Department.
“There’s still standing water, and in some places it’s maybe a foot deep,’’ Rocco said. “We’re not restricting anybody from going in there, but we’re asking if they have to drive through there that they drive very slowly. Even 15 miles per hour will cause wake that can go into homes.’’
Rocco said the water began to rise Monday, and that city officials had contacted the South Florida Water Management District about lowering canal levels because those canals had overflowed.
In Hollywood, red flags still warned swimmers that there could be hazardous ocean conditions, said city spokeswoman Raelin Storey.
“It has improved immensely from what it was over the last few days,’’ Storey said, saying that people began coming back to the beach Tuesday.
Storey said that while a lot of sand blew onto the Broadwalk — which workers have worked to get back on the beach — the city “did not see a lot of beach erosion from this storm.”
She said clean-up efforts continued Tuesday to remove fallen tree limbs and upright some trees.
“Fortunately the weather has really improved today,” she said. “We should largely have it wrapped up by the end of the day today.”
Florida Power & Light reported that power had been restored to most of the tens of thousands of customers who experienced outages due to Isaac.
“We’re in the final stages of restoring power to our customers,’’ said Marie Bertot, a spokeswoman.
As of 2 p.m. Tuesday, FPL reported that 7,000 customers in Miami-Dade were without power, and another 2,730 customers remained out in Broward. About 2,600 customers remained without power in Palm Beach.
Bertot said Isaac caused significant outages to FPL customers in South Florida, and that the utility scrambled to restore power to them quickly.
About 129,000 (out of 1,023,000) customers lost power in Miami-Dade, while 92,700 (out of 874,500) customers experienced outages in Broward. In Palm Beach, 95,650 (out of 687,100) customers lost power.
“We’re proud of the fact that we restored power to nearly 70 percent of our customers within six hours and 40 percent within two hours,’’ Bertot said.















My Yahoo