Amerant Bank Arena floods during Red Wings-Panthers game

The hockey was fine. Getting out of the building after the horn was a different story.

Helene St. James

@HeleneStJames

Crazy scene leaving Amerant Bank Arena here in Sunrise, Florida after Red Wings- Panthers game because of massive flooding.

The Red Wings beat the Panthers 5-3 on Monday night. Justin Faulk and Michael Brandsegg-Nygard scored 45 seconds apart early in the 3rd, and Daniil Tarasov beat the team he backed up last season with 23 saves. Detroit got the 2 points, and then everybody walked outside into a lake. Local TV had hockey fans wading through knee-deep water around the arena, which is about the last thing you expect to see after a November hockey game.

For the Detroit beat writers it was worse than wet shoes. They flew in for the start of a Florida trip and ended the night needing locals to get them out, with the cars staying behind in the flooded lots.

Max Bultman

@m_bultman

Crazy stuff in Sunrise tonight with heavy flooding around the arena area. Huge shoutout to @thomasaharding and @adelynlee for helping us out-of-towners get out of the arena area without our cars!

That says something about how bad it got. Sports writers are used to filing late, sprinting for a flight or eating a cold arena hot dog at midnight. Leaving the rental car in a flooded parking lot because there's no safe way to drive it out is a new one, even for South Florida in storm season.

Then a guy who has covered this team for over 20 years said he'd never seen anything like it. George Richards has been at this building since well before it was Amerant Bank Arena, and South Florida doesn't exactly lack for rain.

George Richards

@GeorgeRichards

The rain started before the #FlaPanthers started play and did not stop. A nightmare for a lot of people tonight. Hope everyone got out safe. Have never seen water like that at this arena in 20+ years.

According to Richards, the rain started before puck drop and never stopped. That's the scary part. A storm that sits over one spot for 3 hours turns a suburban arena surrounded by parking lots into a bathtub, and the Sunrise building is about as surrounded by parking lots as an arena gets. The storm stalled right over the area, and fans who drove in had nowhere to go when it was over.

Nobody has reported any injuries, and that matters more than anything else here. What to watch next is the cleanup: how many cars got swamped in the lots, how the arena handles getting people back to their vehicles, and whether the Panthers say anything about drainage around the building before the next home game. The Red Wings got a win to open their Florida swing. Plenty of people in that building got a much longer night than they paid for.