After speaking with members of the Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, a man paddles back to a flooded neighborhood in Valrico, Florida. Flooding from a nearby waterway turned some neighborhoods into rivers, forcing dozens of people to evacuate their homes.

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VALRICO, Fla. – When the car stopped, the few volunteers from Creekside Church of Christ drove quickly into the blazing Florida sun, grabbing water, hamburger meat and cookies from the trunk and ending up in the shade of three tents.

They laid out snacks and a pot of spaghetti and prepared the meat for the grill for their neighbors who were now using the parking lot as temporary shelter.

A volunteer works the grill for Creekside Church. Church members worked together throughout the day to provide food and drink to anyone who needed it.

Ryan Kellman/NPR

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Three days earlier, Hurricane Milton struck the city of Valrico, Lithia and other communities on Florida’s west coast, bringing damaging winds and widespread power outages.

After the immediate threat from Milton subsided, another emerged: Major flooding from a nearby waterway turned neighborhoods into rivers, forcing dozens of people to evacuate their homes. Some reported that the water was up to their chests and had to be evacuated by kayak.

That’s why members of Creekside, just a mile from a catastrophic flood, gathered Saturday to provide food and water to their neighbors like Shauna Thomas, whose homes are still flooded.

“We want to help,” church elder Robert Clouse said simply of the effort. “I’m worried about these people now.”

“I don’t think we were prepared for this,” Robert Clouse said of both the destruction of Milton and the subsequent flooding in the city. Despite having no power, the church will hold its service this Sunday. Clouse said the service had to be “memorable.”

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Thomas and some of her neighbors have been sleeping in their car in the church parking lot since she managed to escape from her home earlier this week.

“It came in so fast and so hard that we couldn’t do anything anymore. We already knew it was coming, so we were given the basics to get out of it. But it just happened too fast,” she says.

She packed a suitcase of clothes and her dog, Bailey, as floodwaters quickly took over her Rose Street home.

Thomas’ low-lying street is just one of many in Hillsborough County flooded by the Alafia River. The waterway reached a crest height of 25 feet (7.34 meters) on Friday, reaching major flood stage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Other residents NPR spoke to said the area has never flooded this badly. Hillsborough County emergency responders rescued more than 500 residents and 100 pets in the aftermath of the flood.

Floodwaters inundated several areas of Hillsborough County, including Paul Sanders Park in Brandon, Florida.

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By Saturday afternoon the water had receded, but emergency services and residents were still relying on kayaks and boats to enter flood areas. NOAA predicts flooding from the Alafia River will continue in the major or moderate flood stage until early next week.

Thomas has no confidence in what remains of her house where she has lived for two years.

“There is no house,” she said, torn. ‘The man who lives behind me lives in a house that is between three and forty feet high, and there was six feet of water in his house. Mine is lower than that. Mine is only three feet above the ground.”

She thanked the church profusely for providing much-needed resources.

“They brought us food. They brought water. They brought us everything they could,” Thomas said.

She discovered that others in the community have also shown up. One company loaned her a grill to use and another company gave her space to park her car on higher ground when Milton first drove up.

“It’s a strong community, and we’ll get through it one way or another. Now it’s just a matter of praying,” she said. “That’s all we can do.”

In a flooded Valrico neighborhood, a man waits outside a house after paddling two others who entered through the window.

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