Cory Schwisow, interim director of Monroe County Emergency Management, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on with hurricane season.
A Tropical Storm passed through the Carolinas recently.
Schwisow said, “It shows you how quickly something can spin up, you have a small disturbance up there, and then here, a couple days later, it comes off the coast and spins up pretty quickly. I think they had a couple days’ notice before that depression made tropical storm status and then impacted the Carolinas. They’re definitely seeing some flooding concerns, and it shows, kind of like the message that we’ve talked about, where you could hide from that wind, but when you start to get that flooding warning, I mean, once that flood is set in, it’s very hard to make plans at that point and take cover and you look at the catastrophic flooding in Texas this weekend, it is absolutely heartbreaking to see the devastation in Texas and the lives lost during that incident.”
Florida is sending a couple of rapid response teams to Texas to try to help with the devastating flooding in that area.
Schwisow said, “Florida has been the leader and assisting and planning across the nation, and really, anywhere we can lend a hand with our experience and expertise, we do everything we can to assist our brothers and sisters across the nation. These systems, they can get bad. These low pressure systems stall out and in Texas, that low pressure system, similar to a tropical system, stalls out, and it literally will just sit there and dump rain. We’ve seen some of these things in the winter. We have low pressure systems come through and I think Key West experienced that this last year. I mean, we had 9, 10 inches in a in just a few hours. It can go from a normal, sunny day to catastrophic flooding very quickly.”
It’s important to keep informed at all times.
Schwisow said, “If you go to monroecountyem.com you can follow the ribbon in the path to Alert Monroe. If you have not already signed up for alert Monroe, that is going to be the quickest way that you’re going to receive emergency warnings, from tornado warnings to evacuation notices. So anybody in the Keys needs to be enrolled into Alert Monroe so that we can get that messaging out very, very quickly. You look at a lot of the past storms, Milton and Helene and some of the other storms, Debbie, they go from a tropical storm to a major hurricane, cat three within 24 hours. So having a plan is extremely important. What kind of items do you need to keep your family safe? What kind of items do you need to continue your family businesses when you evacuate? Then when you return, what do you need to have in hand to get back into the county? So we keep pushing that message as much as we possibly can and one of the concerns that we have is we had a very, very good evacuation rate for Hurricane Irma. I think we had nearly 80% of the county leave, and some of the feedback we’ve received is I left for Irma. I’m not going to do it again. It was a mess coming back. Then the folks who actually stayed say I’m never going to stay for a storm again. We understand it was frustrating to get back into the county, but we need to make sure that our community is ready to receive those residents back. Do we have running water? Do we have medical services? Have our roads and bridges been inspected so that they’re safe? Once we have those checks in the box and we can actually bring those residents back and help assist, because we don’t want to keep people away from their homes. We need people to come back help with the response and help with recovery as soon as possible.”
There are shelters for tropical storms in the Keys.
Schwisow said, “Our plan is, if it’s a calm storm up to a cat two, we’ll open up our shelters down here in Key West Sugar Loaf, Marathon and Coral Shores. That strong cat two is where it gets a little bit fishy, and I’ll tell you this that we will kind of lean to the side of caution. If it’s a strong cat two I can’t gamble with the safety of our residents and hope that it stays at two. If it’s a strong two, there’s a good chance that we’re going to issue that evacuation notice up to the Miami Dade area, our special needs shelter up at FIU, and then the Miami Dade fairgrounds will assist us with our general population.”
The liveaboards also need to be considered.
Schwisow said, “That’s been a topic of discussion and with increasing our evacuation time to 24 and a half hours, I’m not waiting until the last minute of the last hour to make that decision. As soon as we have a strong, confident track from the National Weather Service, who are outstanding partners to us down here in Florida Keys, we’re going to make that decision as quickly as possible, so we can get our campers, our RVs, our high profile vehicles, out of here as quickly as possible. And then also recognize our special needs population. We keep a close eye on our special needs population so that we can get them assistance as quickly as we possibly can, to get them to safety and make sure that they have all their medical needs taken care of. If you know somebody who needs special assistance, please go to our website. Follow the pathway to our special needs registry. Register your family members or yourself, so that we can follow up with you and those kinds of needs. We’re actually going to be doing our special needs call down, where we personally contact every single one of our special needs residents and go through anything has changed, or any other needs. So we’re already well ahead of that, and then we are on in our final stages right now of updating our local mitigation strategy. It’s a plan that is updated every five years, and it reassess our risks, our hazards, whatever objectives for mitigation moving forward over the next five years, and identifies other projects that we want to look forward to help mitigate some of the effects of our hurricane season. So our local mitigation strategy work group has been working very, very hard over the last six months to get this finalized, and we are in the last few days of getting this submitted to the Division of Emergency Management up in Tallahassee and then over to FEMA. We will be doing our radiological reception exercise for the northern Keys residents that are near Turkey Point. We have not done this exercise in eight years, so we’re invited to get all of our partners together with law enforcement and fire rescue and exercise how would we be sheltering residents affected by a radio radiological incident in Turkey Point. So a lot of moving parts in emergency management outside of hurricane season, but we are maintaining our readiness and keeping our residents informed of any kind of threats.”
For more information, click here: https://www.monroecountyem.com/1324/Emergency-Management/