Corey Schwisow, the Interim Director of Emergency Management of Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
While this hurricane season has been pretty quiet, do not get complacent.
Schwisow said, “We still have well over a month left in hurricane season, which pushes us all the way out to the end of November and we were watching the current system. It’s kind of parked out there in the middle of the Atlantic right now. It’s low pressure system, but the environment is conducted for some development. It has about a 70% chance of development to a system, and it looks like the National Hurricane Center is predicting that a tropical depression could form here in the next few days, but it’s moving west, northwest, and again, I don’t want to put out anything, but until you have a center of circulation with these storms, it’s very hard to predict some of its movements. But right now, a lot of the modeling has it following that northern track, like these previous storms. So I cannot complain about that, and storms aren’t technically bad, the storms you have out there, it keeps those water temperatures somewhat at bay. So, having storms that churn up some of that warm water does help for future development.”
Is there something that’s contributing to the trend that seems to see a lot of the storms head north?
Schwisow said, “No, it’s just weather patterns, you have these outlooks, like, look, it’s going to be a busy season and the season really isn’t much different. It’s just when you look at these high pressure systems, or especially this time of year, when you get these big, strong cold fronts that are coming across the continental United States really helps with steering some of these storms. So when you have storms develop early and they’re getting stronger early, those storms tend to want to go north. If you have those high pressure systems move out of the way, those storms have a highway to travel north. When you have these storms that take some time to develop, they’ll want to meander and just kind of wander westward, and those ones are a little bit concerning to us. But we’ve been very, very lucky. High pressure system moves out of the way, and it gives a nice trough for these storms to move north. So it’s really luck. It’s where do the high pressure systems park themselves, and do we have these nice, big cold fronts come across the continental United States that that really keep these storms at bay? But I really want to just keep a word of caution out there is that we’re getting into the season of October, where we shift our attention from the Atlantic and really start looking closer to home, where you have storms that could spin up, like you just saw, like that amazing weather phenomenon that we just saw last week, with two different hurricanes right next to each other and then Imelda has developed right off the coast from us. We call those the Bahamian rattlesnakes. They’re close to home, they spin up and you don’t have a whole lot of time to make preparatory action in those type of storms. So we’re going to start looking south Caribbean in the Gulf, and hopefully we have a quiet month here.”
King tides can also have a real effect on our area.
Schwisow said, “Even looking at Ian affecting Key West, that was the perfect scenario, wasn’t really predicting a whole lot of surge. But when you have the height of king tide, right at high tide, and you factor in some minimal storm surge, and all of a sudden, what you think is not going to be that bad turns into multiple feet of water into people’s homes. So really, just need to steer to caution and make sure that we’re prepared for any situation. And have a plan.”
The FIFA World Cup is coming up.
Schwisow said, “That’s a huge event. We would like to take a break after hurricane season, but, I mean, as soon as the season’s over, we are very much involved in FIFA World Cup ‘26 and we’ve been in the last year partnering with our neighbors in Miami Dade and Broward County. We’re looking at upwards to about 1.2 million visitors for FIFA World Cup ‘26 and Miami is going to be a focal point of some of these games. There’s going to be seven scheduled games in the Miami area. This is the largest World Cup ever. There’s an increased number of teams for this tournament, and there’s going to be a lot of visitors. So what we’ve been doing is doing a lot of planning meetings, but also having some tabletop and full scale exercises to take a look at crowd control, counter terrorism type situations, mass casualties. What are the things that we’re not thinking about, and what works and what doesn’t work? But we had a really good trial run. Last June, we had Club Cup, and it was very similar. We had European and international teams come in and playing some of the ML teams. So very successful management of that tournament, but that one’s like the little brother of FIFA World Cup. It’s going to be a monster tournament. Looking forward to having visitors visit South Florida, but also need to make sure that our residents and our and our guests stay safe during the time.”
Contingency plans are very necessary.
Schwisow said, “These storms that crawl across the Atlantic, I call them the slow Zambonis. We see them, we prepare for them. We have days to prepare and make plans for our residents and our guests. But when it comes to, and I hate to say it, a mass casualty event, you see some of these happen around the country, I mean, it is a spur of the moment, and you have to have a plan. I mean, you can’t just wing it and hope that you can figure it out, but you have to have plans in place. You’ve got to have your partners in place that you can be able to respond and recover quickly to make sure that the situation doesn’t escalate. Just the network we have down here in the Florida Keys, I mean, Lower Keys Medical Center, every year we have a huge joint exercise where we bring in the Air National Guard, and we’ll actually exercise. How do we get patients out of the hospital that are medically managed we cannot transport via ambulance, and we will load real players onto a c130, and exercise, flying aircraft into the Naval Air Station Key West, and then getting those patients out. That is a mandatory exercise we do every year, and it runs flawlessly, but it shows that partnership, not just with our local partners, but our state partners up north and our federal partners here locally, with our naval friends and military friends. If you’re on social media, you’re on Facebook, we have done a fantastic job this year with our public information officer Kristen Livengood, with all these disturbances, these storms, we’ve been putting out daily updates when we have threats on the Monroe County Emergency Management Facebook page gives detailed modeling, some detailed narrative of what’s going on and preparatory and protective actions that you can take to make sure you’re safe. So if you’re on Facebook, please join us, be our friend, and we’ll get you as much information as we possibly can.”