Dr. Michael Brennan, Director of the National Hurricane Center, speaks to attendees at the 38th Governor's Hurricane Conference in West Palm Beach, 5-15-2024 |
In my private capacity as a citizen and an employee of ESA South, Inc., I have the opportunity to once again attend the Governor's Hurricane Conference 2024 in West Palm Beach this week.
Lots of networking opportunities are present here with disaster response/recovery companies and other purveyors in the exhibition hall--but there are also informative presentations and other learning opportunities available to inform my other position as County Commissioner.
director of the National Hurricane Center, Dr. Michael Brennan. He went through a slide deck presentation describing the changes and improvements made in forecasting for storms since 2004. He also described the fact that over the last 10 years, 100 Floridians have been killed by Hurricanes as the primary cause. In the same period, 200 were killed after the Hurricanes by secondary causes. His big challenge ahead: How to deal with storms that rapidly intensify like Otis did last year to Acapulco? (that storm went from a tropical depression to a Cat 5 in 72 hours) hashtag
Later in the morning, the attendees heard best practices
from the rural, big-bend counties Sewanee, Madison, and Dixie. These three counties were the hardest hit by
last year's Category 3 storm Idalia.
They were joined by Kevin Guthrie, the State of Florida's Director of
Emergency Management. Although there were 20 named storms last year, only 7
became major hurricanes and only 1 hit Florida, according to the presenters at
this morning's general session.
Nevertheless, Idalia did affect multiple counties and caused an
estimated 3.5 Billion in damage in Florida.
As hard as it is to believe--communication with citizens was the biggest issue with Idalia recovery, according to the panel. Cell service was out and the EOC had to be evacuated and the computer networks at the temporary EOC would not work with the EOC software. Folks lost power and could not get messages from TV so the communications with the citizens was a real challenge. This and the removal of large oak trees from roadways. "We had all of these people show up to volunteer to help but none of them had equipment big enough to remove these large trees" said panelist Chris Volz, director of Sewanee County Emergency Management. The storm surge on the coast ended up being 11 feet tall, and all of the members of the panel celebrated the fact that no citizens were lost in these counties due to the storm surge.
1 comment:
I'm glad you are there. Personally we are utilizing this recent storm and power outage to prompt our hurricane preparedness and looking at it like a training exercise.
After Michael, communications as we knew it was non existent.
The resiliency and adaptability was remarkable.
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