State looks at cutting evacuation time
BY ANN HENSON
Citizen Staff
Nothing about evacuating
the Florida Keys
for a hurricane has changed — except the time the state says it takes to
do it.
The latest calculations
in a South Florida Regional Planning Council report — accepted by
Department of Community Affairs Secretary Thaddeus Cohen and bound for
the governor and Cabinet on Tuesday — say it would take 18 hours to
evacuate the Keys. That's about 5.2 hours less than the state said it
would take just two years ago.
That leaves critics such
as Monroe County Commissioner George Neugent accusing the state of
tinkering with the numbers to get them below the now state-mandated
24-hour mark. If Keys residents and tourists cannot clear out within 24
hours, the rule says, the state will not issue the 250 annual allotted
new building permits to
Monroe
County, where U.S.
1 is the only road in or out of the island chain.
Cohen has offered to
issue as many as 3,500 work-force housing permits over the next two
years, in light of the area's affordable housing crisis, if the county
achieves the goals of its state-mandated work plan, which will contain
the Regional Planning Council's new evacuation time and will be reviewed
Tuesday.
Neugent said when he
heard of the new evacuation time at a meeting last week of the county's
work-force housing task force, he called Cohen for confirmation. "He
told me they had accepted this new study that said 18 hours," Neugent
said Thursday. "DCA is manipulating the numbers to say it's a passing
grade."
To arrive at the new
18.2-hour hurricane evacuation time, the Regional Planning Council hired
PBS&J as consultants to update its previously unpublished study on
evacuation times.
In 2004, Miller and
Associates conducted a study and determined that the county could not be
evacuated within the required 24 hours. Officials condemned the research
as flawed.
DCA then suggested
modifying the evacuation procedure to eliminate tourists and other
nonresidents as well as mobile home residents from the equation. The
county agreed to the deal and came up with an evacuation time just shy
of the 24-hour deadline, at 23 hours and 38 minutes.
This latest
who-counts-in-evacuation calculation took the DCA modifications and
further reduced the number of evacuees by saying that not all houses
would be occupied during the summer hurricane season, and that only 75
percent of residents would evacuate anyway.
"That's a lot of
variables," said Mike Stone, spokesman for Florida Division of Emergency
Management, part of the state DCA. "We have a phased evacuation" that
requires tourists to be out of the county 36 hours before a hurricane is
expected to hit the Keys, Stone said.
"The [evacuation] process
begins when you ask the first set of people to leave and it ends when
Mother Nature tells you," he said. "Nothing has changed in our
methodology for working with the county."
However, the new
calculations are part of the Planning Council's regional evacuation
study that includes
Monroe,
Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
The information was also
used in the annual report that assesses Monroe County's overall progress
in meeting state-mandated goals on maintaining appropriate hurricane
evacuation times, cleaning nearshore waters, providing affordable
housing, and protecting habitat for endangered species. Neugent said
more building permits are a sure bet for the county because it received
a passing grade in all four categories, though he said the grades are
unawarranted.
If Monroe continues to
receive passing grades, the state will lift the county's 30-year
designation as an Area of State Critical Concern Oct. 1, 2009. Monroe
County is under the designation, which gives the state oversight on
development issues, because the local government in the 1970s was not
keeping growth in check.
ahenson@keysnews.com |
