BY JAMES WILLIAMS
Special to the Monitor
KEYSTONE HEIGHTS—Since 1953, Bradford County has seen 21 disaster declarations, with only nine due to hurricanes: 21 times a president included the county in a disaster area, most recently following hurricane Irma in 2017.
However, meteorologically, the county was never directly hit by a hurricane during that period. Roads were washed out; there have been floods, downed trees, and tornados, but technically, Bradford County was hit by tropical and subtropical systems, not by sustained hurricane-force winds.
Bradford’s Director of Emergency Management, Brad Witt, has been with the sheriff’s office for 11 years, the last three as director of emergency management.
A Florida statute allows county commissioners to put that duty under a constitutional officer. Thirteen Florida counties, including Bradford, choose to place the position under the sheriff’s office.
Recently, Witt spoke to local Rotary Clubs about one of his favorite professional subjects: emergency preparedness.
“So yeah, I just want you to put that picture in your mind,” Witt told the Keystone Heights Rotarians. “Even the worst you’ve seen could be worse. And that’s why we really like to talk about personal preparedness because if we did get the worst, having every bit of that preparedness in place will ensure that we can recover quicker.”
Witt recently emphasized to the civic group that getting the correct information is the first step to preparedness.
“There is a ton of information out there on social media that can steer us in the wrong direction. … (but) there is also a lot of good online information,” he said.
He advises the public to bookmark reliable sources on phones and computers—whatever updates on weather systems one uses—but he recommends following the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service, the Florida Emergency Management website, the National Weather Service out of Jacksonville, or locally, the Bradford, Clay or Putnam County Emergency Management system.
Emergency Kits
Next, Witt told the club to prepare their emergency supply kits well in advance and not wait until the last minute when you may find empty shelves.
He said flashlight batteries lose their charge if they’ve been stored for a while or if you’ve been using them. Return flashlights to your home emergency kit after each use with fresh batteries.
Witt suggested using the tax-free or sales-tax holidays as a reminder to prepare, one at the beginning of June and another in August or September.
Travel
Planning is essential, he said. “We think we know the way to work because we’ve done this every day, year after year. We think we know the road.”
But what if those roads are filled with traffic from an evacuation? Bradford County has two major routes in the state evacuation plan: U.S. 301 and State Road 100, both of which run through or near Starke and Keystone Heights.
“Let’s all of a sudden put half of South Florida coming up on them. What can that do to those roads?” Witt asked.
Decide for yourself well ahead of time if you would prefer to go to the nearest public shelter or to go, prearranged, to a friend’s or family’s house or even to a hotel in Florida or the next state.
If you are sheltering with agreeable friends or relatives, study beforehand to find the quickest, most effective alternate routes to their home. Figure out each route’s length and look for the shortest and safest. Calculate how much fuel—and cash—might be needed.
Witt makes two points: a) evacuate early if you plan to, don’t hesitate, and b) if safe, use local back roads to get you farther away from the endangered area before taking more heavily used evacuation routes.
If you are in essential services and must shelter in place, you still need plans to stay put. How are you going to get to work? What if the roads are closed? Are there alternate routes to where you need to go? Could you safely stay at the work site if there’s only one route and it’s flooded, or a fallen tree blocks it?
Shelters
Every county offers emergency shelters. Bradford’s primary shelter is Starke Elementary School; its secondary site is the Bradford County Fairgrounds. In Union County, the main shelter is at the High School in Lake Butler. Find out in advance where the nearest shelters are in your county and one or more routes to get to them. Keystone Heights High School is the shelter for the Lake Region.
If you are heading to a shelter, bring your ID, disaster kit, food, change of clothes, prescription medications, sleeping bag and pillow, cash, credit cards, flashlights and batteries, toiletries, essential papers, significant phone numbers, and quiet activities for children.
Visit bradfordsheriff.org and look for the emergency management tab to see what to bring to a shelter.
Be aware that under normal circumstances, a public hurricane shelter is just that; they’re open bays filled with cots, made accessible to as many people as possible. They aren’t necessarily cozy, comfortable accommodations.
Some shelters accept pets; others don’t. Check to see well in advance whether the shelter near you welcomes your fur babies. If not, find a nearby hotel or motel that does.
Account for the needed supplies of all family members, such as infant formula or any medications ordinarily prescribed. At bradfordsheriff.org, find the emergency management tab for more information on what to bring to a shelter, including essential documents.
Consider whether you or a loved one has special needs for electronics, such as an oxygen machine, equipment for a dialysis patient, or a late pregnancy.
Most counties have a registry for special health conditions. In Bradford, it is on the bradfordsheriff.org website, and there’s a link for registration. If the person with special needs has recently moved, they should update their address now; don’t show up at a new county shelter expecting special needs service unannounced.
Whether evacuating or sheltering in place, notify trusted friends, neighbors, or family members so that after the emergency is over, you can be accounted for. This is especially true if you live alone or just you and your spouse.
Documenting
Witt also discussed documenting existing conditions in and around your home.
When the county activates Crisis Track, which allows the county to digitize damage assessment and debris removal operations, it will announce the service via the Everbridge system, press releases, and social media sites.
“I highly encourage you to document your home,” Witt said, especially if you know a storm’s coming.”
Take pictures outside and inside as you would for insurance, documenting conditions before and after.
“During an Emergency Operations Center activation, we put out a call and a link to the public that says, ‘Hey, if you have damage…let us know about it, follow this link.’ You go on there, you put your information in, you upload all your pictures, and it notifies us in the Bradford EOC.”
That information helps emergency operations build a picture of the county emergency. After residents have uploaded photos into the system, they can start their cleanup.
“Nothing is too small to include,” Witt said. “If it blew your gate down, include it.”
Once the danger has passed, the county will come out to check the damage. The system records as well what it costs you to repair the damage; that information, too, is forwarded to government sources.
“Every little dollar counts when we start talking about these things,” he said. “So, watch for calls for Crisis Track information when you see E.O.C. readying for a storm.”
Alerts
Coincidentally, FEMA was hours from testing a nationwide emergency alert system as Witt encouraged his audience to sign up for just such alerts.
“So, when you get that, don’t be alarmed,” he told them.
He referred to a recent test accidentally sent out unannounced early in the morning.
“I got woke up; probably everybody in here got woke up, but what we learned from that is, these things work, right? They actually wake us up to tell us there is an emergency.”
FEMA has its way of sending emergency alerts; the states can also send them—as we all learned one morning at 4:45 a.m.—and the county has the ability to send alerts as well.
“You don’t want to rely just on your cell phone because what if cellular services are down?” Witt asked.
Cones, models, and spaghetti
“There are all kinds of stuff we see on the news or the internet coming from emergency management…these things are everywhere. What means what and what do I need to pay attention to?” Witt asked the Rotarians.
When you see in print or on TV a large, usually white circle of what looks like clouds on a map with arrows pointing toward Florida, “…we’re probably going to get some rain. I mean, obviously, something’s happening there, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a hurricane.”
Nor is it necessarily happening tomorrow. “These could be seven days out. So, this is telling you if you’re looking at a seven-day outlook that, hey, in seven days, there’s going to be some kind of low-pressure system going on here that may organize into a tropical system.
We’re all familiar with the cone. That is a National Hurricane Center product, and the cone tells us not the impacts of the storm but the probable track of the eye of the storm. The cone represents a composite of estimates from several forecasters around the world. The weather center has put it together and said, with only a degree of certainty, “…that storm’s eye is going to track somewhere inside this cone.” The entire state of Florida could be affected by the storm’s outer bands.
Witt said he liked the cone model but cautioned against focusing on the size of the cone.
“Its official name is the “cone of uncertainty.” The cone shows a forecast with high confidence in the narrow parts, but the wide sections may or may not occur for four or five days.
“As we get into days four and five, we really don’t know (what might happen) once this thing gets overland, starts interacting with other systems, whatever, it’s going to change its path.”
Cone models are based on the historical accuracy of the track. Over the decades, forecasters have tried to reduce the size of the cones with varying degrees of success. That is largely because each storm is different; Andrew was a very compact storm compared to Floyd, which looked as if it would cover the east coast. Idalia almost wiped out Live Oak, while 70 miles away, Bradford escaped with relatively little impact. The difference is a bigger or smaller wind field or eye wall, which puts us in or out of the line of impact.
Meteorologists are now talking about ditching the cone because of the issues it creates.
“You’ll never see an official spaghetti model,” Witt added. “Spaghetti models are just that. There are (weather) modeling agencies throughout the world. They do runs every few hours on the data the storm produces and what they think it can do, and they generate these spaghetti tracks off of it.”
Each pasta strand results from a computer somewhere, solving an equation based on information fed into its system.
Whether cone or spaghetti, we tend to look at this and think, “Oh, the storm, it’s absolutely going to follow this line!” But that line could shift hundreds of miles from one hour to the next. Forty-eight hours from now, that path could look very, very different. It could be headed away from you, or it could be headed straight for you.
“Usually, the big red bold text will say, or should, ‘For official guidance, seek out your local emergency management or weather service agency.’” Witt cautioned.
Rumors
Witt also discussed rumor control and social media, stressing the need to keep correct information out front.
“I don’t know if anybody’s noticed over the last few years, but Facebook has changed its timelines. You go, and you look at your feed, you don’t look at posts in chronological order anymore. You look at posts by popularity.”
That means Facebook pushes to the top sponsored posts someone paid to make visible or the most popular posts with the most hits.
“We actually have folks in our E.O.C. whose duty is to track what’s getting play on social media, to make sure we’re getting the right message out.
“Sometimes, we’ll see a post from two days ago, and people are still talking about it. Things have changed a lot in two days, right? … So, I always like to point out that if you look, you’ll see the name of the storm, and right underneath it, you’ll see the date and time that advisory was put out. Always, always, always fact-check your date and time. Understand that these are static, two-dimensional graphics that don’t show us the full extent of what that storm’s capable of. Look at these things but look at them (with an) open mind.”
