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Should I stay or should I go?

Emergency management faces difficult decision of ordering evacuations

By Don Coble don@claytodayonine.com
Posted 5/11/22

CLAY COUNTY – What if an evacuation is ordered a day ahead of an approaching hurricane and it turns away? Or what if officials are confident a pending storm won’t be serious, but it gains …

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Should I stay or should I go?

Emergency management faces difficult decision of ordering evacuations


Posted

CLAY COUNTY – What if an evacuation is ordered a day ahead of an approaching hurricane and it turns away? Or what if officials are confident a pending storm won’t be serious, but it gains strength and makes a direct impact?

County Emergency Management Director John Ward faces those difficult choices every time storm clouds form over unstable waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

One of the greatest responsibilities of the emergency management office is to keep residents safe and informed. That also means gaining the community’s confidence in warnings – even if that means making decisions based on the inexact science of tropical cyclones.

It is a call Ward doesn’t take lightly. But like all emergency management organizations, he believes it’s better to pray for the best and be prepared for the worst.

“If you’re wrong, people don’t take you seriously,” Ward said last week while he took a break from a training class at the Clay County Public Safety Complex ahead of this year’s hurricane season. “It truly is difficult because you know if you cried wolf too many times they’re not going to believe you.”

In addition to the threat of destruction, Ward is faced with the challenge of making sure residents don’t become complacent.

Several factors influence Ward’s decision to call for an evacuation or to assure residents it’s safe to shelter in place. His daunting challenges, however, come with making long-range decisions when a storm is still hundreds of miles away. And when a projected path changes by a single degree, it could change the landfall by several counties.

“One of the major issues we look at is we do what’s called clearance times,” Ward said. “So the clearance time for our evacuation zones in a hurricane is 26 hours. So now backing that up, we do everything based on the onset of tropical-storm-force winds.

You may not have actual landfall until tomorrow morning, but you’re gonna get the onset of tropical force winds this evening. So you’ve got to have everything done before that and in place.”

That 26-hour cutoff can be affected by the time of day, Ward said. If the countdown clock starts during the night, he said decisions will be made so any call to evacuate can be done during daylight.

Information can change when a storm’s coordinates are recalculated every six hours, which exasperates emergency officials who have to decide when, and if, to close schools, order contraflow traffic and, at last resort, call for evacuation shelters to be opened.

“We all know the step changes in six-hour increments so and then backing up even more. I will, literally, about 72 hours out, I have the conversations with the school district Hey, we need to close schools? Do I need your shelters? And oh, by the way, I’m opening up a special needs (shelter), my special medical needs, which generally means physically moving. So that takes more time. So we’re generally backing up to almost a 50-hour mark before landfall of having to make those decisions.

“So you got to make those decisions. Because you got to you’ve got to have time to get everything in place. You gotta open your shelters. You got to set them up. You got to you know, get them ready. So when you issue that evacuation, everybody can start going into the shelters. We hope they don’t go to the shelters.”

But if the order to evacuate is made, it will be the result of years of training, deciphering updated storm information and deciding on an appropriate level of action.