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Lee emergency officials preparing for hurricanes, just in case
MICHEL FORTIER / Staff
Emergency response workers from around Lee County including Bill Floyd, left, and Werner Duswald, right, met at the Lee County Emergency Operating Center for a hurricane preparedness and coordination meeting Wednesday.
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Lee County emergency managers huddled together Wednesday, making strategies they hope they never implement and demonstrating equipment they hope they never use.
The county Emergency Operations Center is ready if a hurricane should come our way, public safety director John Wilson said. Wilson ran through recent hurricane history during Wednesday’s briefing — a history that’s blessedly boring for the past few years.
In fact, the last time the EOC was open for a storm was in August 2006 when Tropical Storm Ernesto — briefly Hurricane Ernesto — was in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The only thing recently that even made a pass at us was Ernesto,” Wilson said. “We didn’t activate at all in 2007.”
That doesn’t mean there won’t be a storm or two — or more — this year. If they come, Wilson said, responders are ready.
Wilson said he finally got the results of a post-storm survey that was done after Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Lee County ordered evacuation of barrier islands and all mobile homes south of the Caloosahatchee River.
Wilson said he was heartened to see that 70 percent of mobile home residents heeded the evacuation order and 48 percent of barrier island residents did the same.
“They actually did better than they did for (Hurricane) Charley,” he said.
Gerald Campbell, chief of planning for emergency management, said the slow season last year may have lulled residents into a false sense of security. Part of EOC’s job, he said, is to convince them that warnings, and especially evacuation orders, must be taken seriously.
“We’re doing our outreach and we’re doing our seminars,” he said. “If it was busier last year we wouldn’t have to work so hard convincing.”
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