Seward Lake, Lakeland: A Week After Milton, the Water Was Still Rising

By the middle of October 2024, a week after Hurricane Milton had crossed Florida, the water around Seward Lake was still going up. The rain had stopped days earlier. On Oakmont Lane, in the Lakeland Highlands area just north of CR 540A, the lake kept climbing anyway.

Seward Lake does not crest and drain the way a river does. It fills from the land around it and then it sits, because the lake has no fast outlet. On Oakmont Lane, that meant the flood arrived after the storm was gone and stayed after the sky cleared.

Bruce and Jill Davis had lived on Oakmont Lane for 28 years. In nearly three decades on that shoreline they had watched the lake rise and fall, which is what a fluctuating lake does. On Wednesday, October 16, Tracy Boyette gave a tour of her flooded home and then walked back out through the floodwater to leave the neighborhood. The photographs from that day show water standing in yards and across the road, still rising as the pictures were taken.

Flooding along the edge of the lake severely damaged homes and cut off access to others entirely — some houses reachable only through standing water, some not reachable at all.

The lake has carried the Seward name for a long time. Zachariah Seward lived on Seward's Lake back when Polk County was still being settled, and the water kept his name. A 1925 account of recreation around Lakeland pointed visitors to Lake Seward for one particular sight: a giant oak with a single branch that reached out 110 feet. That was the draw a century ago, on a small lake most people had no other reason to visit. The homes that line the lake now sit on the same ground that collects the same rain.

Seward Lake has no fast outlet, so water pumped off one property has to go somewhere it won't back up onto another. That routing is why the response required more than a single homeowner or a single crew.

On October 24, Polk County announced a flood relief plan for Seward Lake. The county's plan directed water in coordination with the Southwest Florida Water Management District, moving the standing water off the neighborhood to restore access to the homes that had been cut off along the lake's edge.