‘Sharks swimming in the streets’: Video taken before hurricane in Florida goes viral
Hurricane Nicole made her presence felt in Hutchinson Island, making landfall as a Cat 1 on Thursday before being downgraded to a tropical storm.
The day before heavy rain and high winds pummeled the area, one resident captured an unusual sight while evacuating.
Local surf shop owner Jordan Schwartz was driving on MacArthur Boulevard and noticed two objects shaped like dorsal fins moving at a quick clip in the floodwaters. He pulled out his camera phone. They almost certainly weren’t sharks but they looked like them.
READ MORE: Nicole causes damage in Dade and Broward counties
“Just a couple of sharks swimming in the streets,” he deadpans in the now viral video sold to Storyful.
A woman also in the car laughs as the objects briefly disappear in fast-flowing water.
“Where’d the sharks go?” she jokes.
Schwartz told FOX 35 that he thinks those “fins” were probably debris from a staircase. In another Instagram video, he shows his followers more random stuff scattered in the road, including an overturned orange kayak, which zips past, just a few feet from his car.
“Oh my God, look at this, ” Schwartz says in that video with waves crashing over the beach just feet away. “Kayak crossing. Gotta wait for the kayak to cross. We’re gonna make the news.”
As for a real shark making its way through a Florida street? Not unheard of. as unusual as you’d think.
Back in September, when Hurricane Ian thrashed Southwest Florida, widely shared video showed a creature that greatly resembled the apex predator in the floodwaters of Fort Myers. The Associated Press confirmed that the fish was indeed a shark, likely a juvenile bull common in the region that had been pushed toward land with the raging weather.
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“Young bull sharks are common inhabitants of low salinity waters — rivers, estuaries, subtropical embayments — and often appear in similar videos in Florida water bodies connected to the sea such as coastal canals and ponds,” George Burgess, former director of the Florida Museum of Natural History’s shark program, told the AP. “Assuming the location and date attributes are correct, it is likely this shark was swept shoreward with the rising seas.”
Nicole made the books as only the third hurricane in recorded history to land in Florida in November. The system was moving across the state Friday, headed north, bringing inclement weather with it.
This story was originally published November 11, 2022 at 11:34 AM.
