New evacuation plan increases public's risk
Florida Keys residents,
for the most part, have turned off CNN and the Weather Channel,
unshuttered their homes and returned lawn furniture and potted plants to
customary spots on decks and patios. Our brush with Hurricane Rita left
the county with minimal damage from high water, mostly restricted to an
Upper Keys trailer park and a low-lying area of Key West.
Our collective luck —
bolstered by fickle meteorological forces, prayers offered at Key West's
Grotto of local hurricane lore, or simply optimism — has held. But not
all is unchanged.
Rita's older sister
Katrina, which devastated the Gulf coast, revealed fatal flaws —
literally — in government's response to natural disasters. But agencies
at all levels appear to have learned from those mistakes. Less than a
month later, with Rita bearing down on the Keys, we saw changes in
emergency planning and response.
One notable change was
the evacuation by bus of people who lacked other means to leave — the
buses made stops at fire stations throughout the county, taking evacuees
to the county's mainland hurricane shelter at Florida International
University.
The state positioned
hundreds of National Guard troops in Homestead, poised to help local
police and other emergency workers in the event the storm dealt a
disabling blow to the Keys.
Gov. Jeb Bush moved
quickly to order the evacuation of the Keys, bruising a few local egos
but demonstrating the state was looking out for the safety of local
residents.
The encounter with Rita
was not without glitches. Management of the Upper Keys' only nursing
home was unprepared for an evacuation. State Agency for Health Care
Administration Secretary Allen Levine personally got on the phone to
hospitals and nursing homes to find available beds for residents.
And discussions are
ongoing to resolve an issue with emergency medical care during storms —
a critical issue we are confident will be resolved.
Emergency planners in the
Keys, faced with challenging geography and demographics, have routinely
done a good job of coordinating evacuations. Perhaps it's because they
do it so often. Nonetheless, we were impressed that both state and local
governments quickly applied lessons learned from the Gulf coast
catastrophe.
County commissioners,
though, appear to be tugging in the wrong direction. With hurricanes
Rita and Katrina still dominating national news, and the images of
massive Texas traffic jams and stranded motorists fresh in memory, the
Monroe County Commission voted last week to approve changes to the
county's evacuation plan that will increase the risk of a local
evacuation catastrophe.
The changes serve to push
the county's staged evacuation beyond our 24-hour requirement by
evacuating visitors and special-needs groups earlier. It looks good on
paper, but the presumption that there will be adequate time for such
staging is a dangerous one.
Did the commission forget
Hurricane Katrina's unexpected southerly turn, which caught most Keys
residents off guard in the middle of the night? Did commissioners not
notice that Hurricane Rita grew from a tropical storm to a Category 4
hurricane in 24 hours? That it grew from a Category 3 to the
third-strongest storm on record in 24 hours?
The actuality, the
changes have more to do with development than hurricanes. Because
development restrictions hinge on the ability to evacuate the Keys in 24
hours, the changes open up the Keys to increased development — no one
seems to know exactly how much. The new plan could increase by thousands
the number of people on U.S. 1 during an evacuation. (Let's not forget
that redevelopment of Keys motel rooms and mobile homes as resort units
larger than many single-family homes also is swelling that number in a
way that remains below the growth management radar screens.)
The commission's changes
to the evacuation plan are not in the interest of public safety. Not
even the Monroe County Commission can fool Mother Nature.
With the heightened
sensitivity to disaster response resulting from Rita and Katrina, we're
hopeful the state will take measures to convince the commission that the
changes are a bad idea.
— The Citizen |
