If a hurricane forces you to evacuate this year, will you have a place to go?
In Broward County, the amount of shelter space available for residents and visitors will be limited by the number of workers on hand to run its emergency evacuation centers.
Right now, there aren’t enough.
Evacuees could be forced to travel further from their homes to get to a shelter with space for them — or they might have to leave the county altogether. That’s why officials recommend that people look to friends and family who live outside evacuation areas for a place to stay before going to a shelter to ride out a storm.
The county lucked out last year, with a hurricane-free season that didn’t require any county shelters to be opened.
But all it takes is one major hurricane to stress it to the max.
Irma had people worried
That’s the lesson learned in 2017 during Hurricane Irma, a Category 4 storm that covered the whole state and scared many people into seeking shelter.
Broward struggled to staff its shelters — even though it opened only about two-thirds of them. It had 431 workers for the 27 opened shelters, Commissioner Beam Furr said, and served close to 14,000 evacuees and hundreds of their pets.
Tracy Jackson, the county’s emergency management director, said the county would need more than a thousand workers if it had to open all of its shelters. It’s hundreds short.
With the start of hurricane season seven weeks away, the county still doesn’t have a plan in place. It’s asking for help from cities and the school district to cobble together enough people to have on call for the shelters.
Broward school officials say they have 200 staff members trained to work in shelters and more will receive training. The district’s role is to provide assistance operating the shelters, which are mostly based in schools, spokeswoman Nadine Drew said.
Broward may be a big county, but its government doesn’t have a large non-emergency staff to tap for the shelter work because it serves only a small unincorporated area.
Palm Beach County ready
Palm Beach County, by contrast, serves a massive swath of unincorporated communities. Bill Johnson, the county’s emergency management director, said he expects to have more than 400 people available to staff the county’s 15 shelters — enough, he said, to provide for two crews to work 12-hour shifts at each of the shelters.
Palm Beach County also has contracts to provide a nurse and certified nursing assistant at each of its shelters, Johnson said. The county’s help includes some workers from the school district and the American Red Cross. County workers have already gone through their second annual round of training.
What officials found out in Hurricane Irma were their limitations if a major hurricane struck. Because Irma affected all of Florida, it wasn’t possible to get Red Cross or other volunteers from other parts of the state.
The Red Cross still provides help, but not to the extent it did in the years before Irma.
“In some shelters we will be having a supporting role and in some shelters we will be running them,” said Grace Meinhofer, South Florida communications director for the American Red Cross.
Jackson said Broward will be requesting about 35 to 50 American Red Cross volunteers, enough to staff seven dormitory settings in county shelters.
Broward tries something different
Broward looked outside the box last year for a solution to the staffing crisis. It said certain new developments — those in evacuation zones east of U.S. 1 — would not receive county approval unless the city where they were built supplied workers for the shelters.