Thoroughbred racehorses evacuated after heavy rain floods stables at Gulfstream Park
More than a dozen thoroughbred racehorses were rescued Monday after heavy rain left their stables flooded at Gulfstream Park Racing and Casino in Hallandale Beach.
Video shared on Twitter by Joel Franco, a South Florida social media news influencer, shows the area around the casino severely flooded Monday morning. A man on a kayak is seen rowing by several partially submerged buildings.
Hallandale Beach got pounded with 8 to 10 inches of rain overnight, according to the National Weather Service in Miami.
All of the horses are fine and are in the process of being moved to higher ground, a racetrack spokesman said. Crews are also working to pump out the water.
Kenneth McPeek, a Kentucky-based trainer who races at Gulfstream Park in the winter, has 26 horses at the racetrack.
The trainer, who recently returned to Kentucky for the holidays, received a call about the flooded stables early Monday.
He’s been on the phone ever since, getting updates on the horses and coordinating efforts to move them out of the flooded stables. Besides being wet from standing in the water, the horses are fine, he said.
Their stables, which McPeek said had just been renovated last week, are another story.
“The whole barn area is inundated in water,” McPeek said.
The horses will be taken to McPeek’s farm in Summerfield near Orlando, he told the Miami Herald Monday morning. Once the water recedes, his team will go in to clean the barn and replace the hay before the horses return.
“It’ll take a bit of time but it’s nothing we can’t handle,” he said.
There was still significant flooding in the area by Monday afternoon.
Arseniy Moroz of Hallandale Beach and a friend visiting Gulfstream Park used parts of a plastic water bottle they’d cut in half to scoop out water from their car on the edge of the parking lot, which was almost entirely filled with water.
Moroz said the pair left the car in the lot overnight and had to push it from the center to the edge, where the flooding was less severe. Still, he said, the car wouldn’t start.
McPeek, who has been training horses for more than 30 years and has won more than 115 stakes in his career, said this isn’t the first time he’s seen the Gulfstream stables flood.
It happened in the 1990s too but it’s “unusual,” he said.
“I’ve been coming there for a very long time and this is really unusual,” he said. “But horse people are very resilient and we’ll sort it out, pick it up and be up and running again in no time.”
With Nochebuena and Christmas coming up, races are not scheduled to resume until Thursday, allowing some more time for the area to dry. The number of horses relocated was not immediately available Monday.
Miami Herald staff writer Aaron Leibowitz contributed to this report.
This story was originally published December 23, 2019 at 12:16 PM.
