Sarasota County Officials Downplayed Flood Risk. Tropical Storm Debby Exposed their Failures.

Tropical Storm Debby didn’t look like trouble.

No hurricane-force winds. No mass evacuations. Just forecasts, quietly urgent, calling for historic rainfall.

Sarasota County officials weren’t alarmed. Days before landfall, the public works director — who two years earlier had called the county “one of the most flood-protected communities in the state, if not the nation” — went on vacation…

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