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New evacuation proposal wrong
Fresh on the heels of a paperwork shuffle
that allowed county and state officials to revamp hurricane clearance
times for the Florida Keys and allow more building permits to be issued
yearly, yet another potential revamp is currently in the hands of state
officials that will drastically change the anticipated clearance times.
And that drastic change
would allow nearly five times as many building permits to be issued each
year than current guidelines call for.
According to local
officials, the state Department of Community Affairs is in receipt of a
report sponsored in part by the South Florida Regional Planning Council
that claims the actual hurricane evacuation time for Monroe County is
closer to 18 hours than 24 hours.
The only way county and
state officials could get below 24 hours in the last paperwork drill was
to remove tourists, visitors and those living in mobile homes and
low-lying areas from the equation.
Hurricane evacuation
times are supposedly calculated so that everyone who visits or lives in
the Keys can be out of harm’s way, up the only road in or out, at least
12 hours before the onset of gale-force winds.
Because Monroe County
uses a phased evacuation process, tourists and visitors are asked to
leave two days prior to that magical time, and mobile home dwellers and
those who live in low-lying areas are asked to leave 36 hours out.
The county claimed, with
the state’s backing, that once the former two groups were removed from
the equation, evacuating the remaining full-time residents could easily
be accomplished within the 24-hour mandate.
That scenario hasn’t
actually worked in any real-life evacuation thus far, but the paper
pushers—well that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
Now along comes someone
with an even sharper pencil.
They have used that
pencil to create assumptions about our population.
It seems they have
subtracted what they feel are their best guesses about occupancy rates
in the remaining single-family homes during the typical hurricane
season. In that guess, they claim that occupancy of the remaining
homes in Monroe County is well below 100 percent during the time of year
when we could be most threatened by a major storm.
And since that occupancy
rate of the remaining homes is below 100 percent, we don’t have to be
able to evacuate a non-existent population. We only have to be able to
get out the people who are actually here and need to leave.
Yes, Monroe County has
seen a declining population in the last few years. Yes, the normal times
for hurricane season do coincide with the least number of residents in
their homes. Most of the snowbirds, vacation homes and on-the-market
homes are vacant during normal hurricane season times between June 1 and
Nov. 30 of each year.
And those assumptions
held true during Hurricane Katrina, which took an uncharacteristic turn
to the south overnight and swept pretty much over the top of us, and
during Hurricane Wilma, when a storm that had remained stagnant near
Mexico finally broke free and rushed here in less than two days.
Both storms caught both
our emergency management personnel and residents flat-footed. There
would not have been any way to get everyone out who was here in time had
either storm blown into a major conflagration before it hit.
The evacuation scenario
is designed to take into account the major storm that forms quickly and
moves quickly. That seems to be in direct opposition to these new
assumptions that say we’ll have at least three-and-a-half days to get
everyone out of the way.
And to top all of that
off, now we hear that the county wants 3,500 new building permits to
kick-start affordable housing projects.
The logic breaks down in
several places here, but most notably when we factor in that eventually,
in 10 years or so, those empty homes will be more filled with full-time
residents, and we’ve added 5,000 new homes to the landscape, we’ll be so
for away from being able to get our people out of here that nothing we
do, short of hunkering down and facing the storm, will make any sense.
And then, thanks to fuzzy
math and someone’s sharp pencil, and a whole host of assumptions that
only make sense in the short term, we will be playing with lives.
And that is wrong.
Completely wrong. |
