Cory Schwisow, Interim Director of Emergency Management for Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this mornign to talk about what’s going on in the county.
Schwisow is now the permanent director of emergency management.
He said, “I am so unbelievably proud to be able to serve the residents of Monroe County in this capacity. So really looking forward this longevity and really calling this place home.”
What has been going on with the effects of Hurricane Melissa?
Schwisow said, “What a devastating hurricane that Melissa was. I mean, it really shows you the power these storms can can create, especially this time of year. That’s what we’re really watching, the south Caribbean, I mean, we’re still 85 degrees. It’s still well above what that water temperature needs to be to create these hurricanes. It’s a time of year that makes me the most nervous because it doesn’t give us a whole lot of time. You see these storms spin up and they want to come north. A lot of times, when they come north, they start interacting with these strong, autumn cold fronts that are coming across the United States. When they interact with these cold fronts, they will bounce off and head east. So when you see, like what Wilma was, in early 2000s comes north, my worst fear is having a US 1 shoot, so water temperatures are coming down near us, but like Melissa, it created so much power. From what we’ve heard, it’s going to be a couple of years for Jamaica to fully recover from the storm. What was so unique about Melissa, when we’ll just take Irma and compare Melissa to Irma, Melissa was very compact. That eye wall was extremely intense. But when you look beyond that eye wall, you had 185 mile an hour winds at that eye, just a few miles away, 20 miles away, 40 miles away, those winds were far less. But if you were inside that eye wall path, it created such destruction to the airports in Montego Bay, the all the ports there. So getting supplies into Jamaica is going to going to have some challenges.”
Readiness and recovery training continues.
Schwisow said, “We’ve had quite a bit of turnover over the last several months, and one thing I want to do is get the right people in the right seats in my EOC. So last week, we invited the Florida Division of Emergency Management down to provide two different trainings, one for damage assessment. How do we properly conduct a damage assessment? We have a fear, and there’s been rumors of that per capita index, that PCI index to increase, and I know we’ve talked about it in the past, where that is how we can get a federal disaster declaration and what that does is it turns on a large sum of money to help us pay for the response and recovery efforts. So I brought in a damage assessment training, and then we also did debris monitoring and debris assessment training for our partners. Moving forward, coming into the off season, we also have a new damage assessment software tool called crisis track. You can use it with the network, but if you don’t have a network, it’s hands free. It has all the tax information in different areas where you can quickly conduct a damage assessment, bring that information back to our EOC, upload it to web EOC, and it’ll create all the FEMA forms that we need to submit a damage assessment. Some things that could take us days to do, we can do within hours. So my goal moving forward is get people trained to start working with the software, and then later on, before the next hurricane season, let’s find an area in the Florida Keys and actually get our teams, our damage assessment teams, out there in the field, use that information, come come back, generate the forms so we don’t have the first time to be the first time. It’s old military saying that we used to say all the time. We’ve got to make sure our people are trained, they know how to use the equipment and the software that we have to respond and recover.”
Hurricane season goes all the way through November.
Schwisow said, “Although our weather has turned quite pleasant here, it doesn’t take much to get these storms spinning up. Down in the Caribbean, we’re still 85 degrees, 86 degrees down there. So those storms can form. They get strong enough. It doesn’t really matter if the water down here, 78, 79, that’s the magic number, 79, 80 degrees for these hurricanes, for them to sustain longevity. So if a storm builds kind of like Melissa did, it’s going to take a lot of time and space for that that storm to slow down. So definitely don’t drop your guard. Enjoy the nice, cool weather and the breezes, but keep prepared. Make sure you have a plan, as we do have a late season storm. A lot of people are talking like, why haven’t we had more storms? They said it was going to be above normal. Storms are going to form. But I like to say it’s about timing. How do these storms interact with troughs and fronts coming through? How’s that Sahara dust? So it wasn’t the fact that the storms were out there. The storms were there. They were developed. But there is other different environmental features that were were inhibiting some of that growth. So we were spared this season so far. We still have a good almost 30 days left in hurricane season. So I just want everyone to stay prepared and have a plan.”