Cory Schwisow, Director of Emergency Management for 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.
The county had a full blown exercise regarding hurricane preparedness with hurricane season beginning today.
Schwisow said, “Pretty much as soon as the season ends in November, we take about a two week breather, and we immediately start the planning phase of this hurricane exercise, and one of my focal points was we’re really good at exercising wind threats and wind damage, and I really wanted to exercise what would look like if we had a Wilma type storm surge. So we took a look, had a great scenario developed by our National Weather Service partners, John Rizzo, down in Key West, and he developed a scenario that we had about anywhere between four to I would say 10 feet of storm surge from Key West to Key Largo, and we had about 80 or so participants throughout the county, some state, federal, and our local partners, and what a great exercise, I mean, one of the big things that we take out of this is sometimes we get a very broad picture of what we want to accomplish, but then we go into some smaller meetings, we call them tactics meetings and operations meetings, and they take my objectives and say, okay, now, how do we accomplish these objectives, and we learned a lot, we identified some gaps in our issues, and when we bring everybody together, we really focus on how is this realistic, and one of the items was, we want to establish staging areas, and how do we get logistics in right away. Well, if we have a catastrophic storm surge, we can’t wait until the storm happens, then position those assets, so we really took a hard look of where north of the Florida Keys and Homestead and Florida City and Miami-Dade can we pre-stage personnel and equipment so that we can quickly establish these sites, and I think we learned a lot of what we can do a little bit easier, work a little bit more efficiently and effectively, so an overall outstanding success for this exercise this year.”
Pre-positioning certain assets is really critical.
Schwisow said, “You look at Wilma, I mean, indeed, we lost dozens of emergency vehicles due to flooding, and we need to be able to stay ahead of that type of threat, and we need those vehicles, we need those resources and services as soon as that storm passes. So we definitely learned a lot, and we’re in a flood zone. If we’re going to have any type of flooding, everybody’s going to feel that. And I really want to stress storm surge. We’ve talked about this over the past several months. I mean, storm surge is our biggest threat. You can’t run from this water. Yes, you could have an elevated home, but this water comes in violently, and anything that’s not secured or can float, I mean, you even saw an Irma, people’s vehicles, parked underneath their vehicles, floating into the pillars. I was at one home where somebody’s refrigerator actually went through the floor that was above that refrigerator under the house due to that storm surge, so as quickly as it comes in, it’s going to leave just as violently and quickly.”
Storms can be incredibly powerful.
Schwisow said, “We worked a lot this off season with Florida International University. They’re doing a lot of studies on winds and winds on elevated structures, and we have this sense of security that I have an elevated home and we have better building codes, but upwards to about 76% of all elevated structures will incur some sort of damage in a hurricane type event, so what they’re really taking a close look at is how can we improve those elevated structures all the way down to the columns that elevate your home, and they found that the square columns in your home actually are less effective than round columns, but esthetically people like the square columns, they look better. They’ve done a fantastic job. And we visited the wall of wind up there, and here in the next several years, they’re going to incorporate the wall of wind with a surge type wave pool to show what types of surge and wave action we might see during a hurricane, so really great improvements coming our way.”
A symposium today will see public information officers from around the county gather to make sure that everybody is on the same page, and that we are ready for any eventuality.
Schwisow said, “Transparency is the key to communication, and if I know something, and I can provide that information as quickly as possible, we’re going to do that as soon as I possibly can. And what better way can we do it with, with our media partners, Kristen Livengood has done an outstanding job for Monroe County, and when we have a storm approaching, she’ll establish our joint information center, which is our JIC, and it’s comprised of other PIOs from around the county and other agencies, and they are there to focus that constant message to the public, and one of the biggest concerns that we have, and we already see it today, is rumor control already. We here in Monroe County, and across the nation, love to look at the forecast models, and I want to caution everybody, things change every six hours, so when you’re taking a look at a model that may look a little bit concerning two weeks from now, just take a look at it again in six hours, probably going to change. So really stay towards your National Hurricane Center sources. I would try to stay off Facebook and Instagram, unless it’s a trusted source. There’s a lot of AI-generated information that gets put out there, and all it does is create unnecessary fear, and it distracts us from our mission here, but we do have an established group of people that will monitor those types of posts, and we’ll try to push out and squash them those rumors as quickly as possible.”
Be very, very careful what you believe on social media.
Schwisow said, “When we saw during Hurricane Milton, we saw some fake storms, someone actually created Hurricane Nadine off of our East Coast in the Atlantic, while Milton was approaching the West Coast of Florida, and we received dozens of calls asking, are you going to issue evacuation, and then what it does is cause people to do something unnecessary and puts them in harm. If we would start evacuating people north, you’re now approaching a pretty catastrophic storm, so we will push out that information as quickly as we can, we’ll squash as much rumors as we can, but it is destructive in our planning process.”
Complacency is our enemy. We need to be prepared.
Schwisow said, “Today is the day I live in seven day windows, so in the next seven days you are looking very good. I’m looking at it right now, some, some Sahara dust that are making its way across the Atlantic right now. If you’re down there in Key West, and you’re looking at one of those beautiful sunsets, you might see a different shade of sunset with some of that dust in the atmosphere. But it’s a double-edged sword. I enjoy the dust, because it definitely dries out that upper atmosphere, which is one factor in creating hurricanes, but it does cause some nuisance with your vehicles and some haziness out there. But everything is looking really good, but that water temperature is creeping up there. I spent some time on the water this weekend, and that water temperature is already about 85 degrees, and so it’s definitely warm enough to create some turbulent weather, if that were to happen. I want everybody to be prepared, I know that we’ve heard a lot about El Nino and that we should have less storms and less major storms. It only takes one, and if you think back to 2004 that was a strong El Nino year. And I think there was about a month straight where we had storms approaching our Florida coast, then also Hurricane Andrew was an El Nino year, and it only takes one catastrophic storm to make it an impactful season.”
For more information, click here: https://monroecountyem.com/