Cory Schwisow, Director of Emergency Management for Monroe County Emergency Management joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
Hurricane season officially ended this weekend.
Schwisow said, “It was a great season. I guess I’ll tell everybody, welcome to the offseason. We look at like sports. Now, what do you do in the offseason? You get everything ready and prepare for what worked and what didn’t? The last real time that we didn’t have a storm was a decade, but then you start looking beyond there, and I think we went a decade prior to that. I think 2005 or 2015 without a hurricane landfall, we had tropical storms. So definitely, we were well overdue for a quiet season, since we had gone 10 straight years with some sort of landfall. But we definitely are going to keep our guard up. Even in the off season, you’ll get those low pressure systems that come up and may dump 10 plus inches of rain. And that’s definitely not uncommon in the wintertime.”
Preparation is always key.
Schwisow said, “This next two weeks, three weeks is really the only time that my team has a little bit of a break where we can kind of exhale and relax our shoulders a little bit. Because starting January 1, we’re heavy into planning for our hurricane exercise. We’ll be participating in the statewide hurricane exercise in April, and then we have some other things, like Turkey Point, we have an exercise in February, and then reviewing our shelter plans and getting our shelter managers together and conducting an activation of one of four of our shelters in the county. So yeah, a lot of moving parts. Really, what people need to take a look at and prepare for is kind of what happened last spring. When we have that dry season, before the rainy season, we have a threat, we saw it last year of wildfires, up there on the stretch, so we’ll be taking a look at our wildfire plans, and then how can we better support our visitors and our residents if that were to happen again? So we’ve got a lot on our plate coming forward, but we’re looking forward to it.”
The Department of Emergency Management is looking to fill a new position.
Schwisow explained, “We kind of merged two positions that were terminated to combine into one, senior planner, emergency manager, and it’s for mass care administration. So if you have a health care background of working with a special needs population and have administrative background, definitely take a look at Monroe County website for our open jobs, and we’re looking to fill that position as quickly as we possibly can to make sure we’re ready to go for next year. You can go ahead and follow the links to our human resources and our open jobs and open vacancies, and you can apply right through the portal, and we’ll receive your application and give you a call. So it’s something that’s very vital to this county, and I have a few Florida Statutes that we’re required to satisfy, especially in that healthcare field. All of our hospitals, adult day cares, anybody with healthcare facilities, they’re required to submit their comprehensive emergency management plan and our continuity of operation plans to our team here in the county, and we review those plans to make sure that they’re accurate, that they’re planning for the right hazards, and then we will approve those on an annual basis. So it is a very, very important job for for us to continue to network with our healthcare partners.”
Have there ever been named storms after December 1?
Schwisow said, “Although it’s very rare, there’s been some May storms, but very, very, very rare. As long as thosetemperatures in the Caribbean stay warm, which they have pretty much all of November, they definitely can spin something up, but you go offshore right now, we tried to take the boat out this weekend, and those winds are definitely kicking. So that’s one thing that definitely helps out the Florida Keys, we get those trade winds brewing up, and it’s really just is difficult to sustain tropical characteristics.”
If you are interested in the new position, click here: https://www.monroecounty-fl.gov/201/Human-Resources