Florida knows how to do hurricanes. From planning for supplies and rescue crews, to managing rescues and cleanups, state and local officials have gained more experience than they’d like in responding to the storms.
“There’s so many different types of emergencies. We seem to have the hurricane one down pat because we practice that all the time,” said state Rep. Christine Hunschofsky, a Democrat who represents northwest Broward.
Hunschofsky was mayor of Parkland when the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre took place in her city on Feb. 14, 2018. A shooter killed 17 people and injured 17 at the school.
Elected officials and emergency managers who gathered Friday for a discussion of resilience and emergency operations said the ability to respond to the unexpected — such as the massive flooding in parts of Broward in April or the deadly condominium collapse in Surfside in 2021 — isn’t as well-honed.
“It’s just the density of our environment and just the climate figuratively and literally that we live in, we’re going to have another one. We’re going to have more,” said state Sen. Jason Pizzo, a Miami-Dade Democrat who represents East Broward. “And it’s obviously better to be prepared and plan, so that we don’t panic.”
Pizzo is keenly aware of the implications of unexpected disasters.
On June 24, 2021, his district included Surfside, where the Champlain Towers South condominium collapsed, killing 98 people. By April 15 of this year, his reconfigured district included all of coastal Broward and some communities inland to Florida’s Turnpike. He spent seven hours working the phones that day working to connect people and agencies at various levels of government to help respond to the county’s massive flooding.
The things that worked — and some that didn’t work well — prompted Friday’s gathering of about 90 people in Hollywood, including two key players: Kevin Guthrie, director of the state Division of Emergency Management, and state Sen. Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula.
Albritton and Pizzo have already been working together in this area. Albritton is the chair, and Pizzo is the vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Resiliency. After the 2024 elections, Albritton will become president of the Florida Senate and Pizzo will become the Senate Democratic leader.
Also present Friday: elected state legislators, city and county mayors, and city commissioners, along with municipal police and fire chiefs and emergency managers. The gathering even included lobbyists, who have a skill that can play a role in a crisis — using contacts in government, politics and the private sector to make things happen quickly.
Guthrie said officials need to do several things before and during disasters.
He said planning for all sorts of scenarios, not just hurricanes, is essential. He said he encountered some news media skepticism when he canceled a hurricane exercise — but that’s because he replaced it with an exercise for dealing with a large outbreak of tornadoes in a scenario in which they affected a large region.
Hurricanes are different in a significant respect, Guthrie said, because they are forecast in advance. Many other kinds of disasters — such as tornadoes, a building collapse, a railroad derailment, or the Fort Lauderdale flooding — are unknown until they strike.
Guthrie challenged the assembled group. “How are you at the no-notice event when you have to spin up all that stuff?”
Once a disaster takes place, it’s essential to establish a small number of clear priorities. “I would ask you to, in future disasters, think simple. Think very simple,” Guthrie said.
For example, he said, something he urged as one of three immediate priorities in the aftermath of the Fort Lauderdale-area flooding was clearing the hundreds of disabled cars from roadways.
Guthrie also offered a blunt message to local elected officials and city managers: They need to have the confidence in their emergency managers to run the operation during a disaster. “There’s an alarming trend in emergency management with elected officials and city managers taking over everything” when a local state of emergency is declared.
Obviously, he said, a city manager wouldn’t try to take command and control from the fire chief if the top floors of a high-rise condominium building were engulfed in flames. That same principle applies to disaster response.
But he said, elected officials have a vital role that doesn’t involve attempting to get involved in the mechanics of making things happen. He said elected officials are critical at convening important and reliable information to the public.
“You are the trusted face of your community,” Guthrie said.
Hunschofsky said communicating clearly, accurately and effectively with the public can be complicated. The Stoneman Douglas massacre was in Parkland, the Broward Sheriff’s Office was in charge of law enforcement and it happened at a School District building.
“There was a lot of mass confusion and a lack of communication,” she said.
Albritton comes from a county of 26,000 people, with three municipalities each separated by miles. He said Broward, where another city can be on the other side of a street, presents its own challenges.
He was with Pizzo on the day of the Broward flooding, also working the phones to help marshal assistance. He said it seemed as if there was “a disconnect between each of the municipalities and the one next door.”
“I would encourage you to take a renewed approach to reach out to — maybe it’s old-school style — to taking a new approach to reaching out to the municipalities that you border,” Albritton said.
Pizzo said his experience with Surfside showed him that the most unexpected things can come up in a disaster, and can be lessened with advance planning for all sorts of contingencies.
After the Surfside disaster, he said, there was an explosion in fraudulent GoFundMe accounts purporting to raise money for affected families. He said many of the supposed charities were fraudulent, and some used ill-gotten gains to go on shopping sprees at the Aventura mall.
Also after surfside, important cultural differences arose at a scene where there were many bodies. Different religious denominations, and different branches within denominations, had vastly different priorities. “Be sensitive about religious circumstances. The approach and recovery of bodies are completely different,” he said.
“I can’t tell you how important preparation is,” Pizzo said.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Facebook, Threads.net and Post.news.