Shannon Weiner, Director of Emergency Management for Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the possibility of another tropical storm.
Tropical Storm Rafael could be headed our way.
Weiner said, “The National Hurricane Center has the cone out for that potential tropical cyclone 18 and it looks like it’s going to strengthen to a category one as it passes to our west, southwest, between Wednesday and Thursday right now. Even though we’re not in the cone, we have to remember that sometimes the impacts of a storm extend outside the cone. Right now we are keeping a very close eye on it. It does look like the weather could be pretty nasty on Wednesday and Thursday. The wind probabilities right now for Tropical Storm sustained winds is about one in three. So we’re going to keep a close eye on that, today through tomorrow, and we’ll see if the National Hurricane Center puts us under that watch. But we’re looking definitely, regardless, for a stormy day, Wednesday, starting early in the morning throughout the day, as the storm passes to our south, southwest.”
The Emergency Operations Center had an after action review recently after Hurricane Milton.
Weiner said, “We did quite well. After every EOC activation, we do what is called that after action review, or sometimes, if we do it immediately after, we’ll call it hot wash, where we look for ways to improve our response activities. We didn’t have a lot of time between Helene and Milton. So we waited until Milton was finished and got our staff together. Sometimes we just do it internal with our staff. Sometimes, we’ll bring in everyone that was involved in the response and sometimes it even extends into the community, like we did after Hurricane Irma. Milton was a small storm for us, but some good things came out of it. We actually heard from our partners that they’re looking for a more regularly timed updates out of our Joint Information Center. So we’re going to try and work with our partners to see what works best for them, because I know they, in turn, use that information to plan their own protective action decisions and their own schedules. So we’re going to work on getting them some regularly established timelines for updates. Internally we share a lot of reporting. We ask our municipalities to send us what we call a situation report, basically, the status of what their operations are and are ongoing in their municipalities. They’ve asked us for a standardized form to upload into our computer systems. So we’re going to do that for them, have it tailored to their needs. Just as far as the facility goes, the building was excellent. The systems inside all work very well. The AV system is quite extensive in our incident command center, and it was really wonderful to be able to have multiple video monitors up monitoring in real time, the traffic, the weather. It was just incredibly helpful to us to have that information in real time and be able to respond and accordingly. It was very good information and ways to improve came out of that review.”
EOC training exercises will continue.
Weiner said, “We have two training exercises that we are going to participate in, one here in November and one in December. The first one in November is actually being put on by Homeland Security Task Force southeast, which is the Department of Homeland Security’s Task Force for responding to those migrant landings, to a mass migration situation. So some of our staff will be traveling to US Southern Command in Doral in a couple weeks to have what we call a tabletop exercise where we’ll work with all our state and federal and local partners in the region, and walk through a mass migration scenario in the region, and kind of look for those areas where we’re not connecting, where we may be like a little siloed in our response, and look for ways to improve that response and our information sharing and making sure that everyone has what they need should we have a mass migration event? So that’s coming up in November, and our partners from emergency management in Miami Dade and Broward County will be there as well, as well as the Florida Division of Emergency Management. That’s something we actually do annually. And as long as I have been with Monroe County Emergency Management, we have had the opportunity to train and exercise with those Department of Homeland Security entities every year. So really a good a good opportunity to help us stay prepared. The second event that Monroe County Emergency Management is what we call a Marine reception exercise, and we are doing that with our Monroe County partners, as well as FEMA. The Marine reception exercise is what we call a field exercise. We’ll go out in the field and actually do some hands on work where we will test our response on how in the event of a radiological accident at Turkey Point power plant. We need to evacuate people off the water in the Upper Keys and Key Largo area, how we bring them in and on back to land safely? So a lot of coordination with our friends at the sheriff’s office and FWC and the US Coast Guard, as well as our fire rescue agencies from Islamorada north, our partners at Miami Dade emergency management. We will actually be testing our communications out on the water and bringing people in on a boat to go through the decontamination process and prepare them for transfer if they needed medical assistance. So it’s a lot of coordination. Our radiological program has been working on it for several months now, and we’re really excited to see it come to fruition. FEMA will be there. It is a FEMA requirement that we do this, and they’re there to help evaluate and keep us on track and give us good advice. So we appreciate their partnership as well.”