Our recent brush with Hurricane Ian brought with it a good bit of time spent in our city’s Emergency Operations Center at City Hall. As mayor, one of the duties is to be around at the city’s EOC for decisions and helping direct the city’s response to the disaster du jour. There is a good deal of preparation that the city staff undertakes in advance of a storm, and those staff members put in a lot of hours getting us ready and city assets protected.
Of course, our EOC coordinates with Monroe County’s EOC and all our other stakeholders. Each local government has its own Incident Command System (ICS), as required by FEMA in order to deal with disasters and other incidents. Ours consists of the mayor, city manager, fire chief, city clerk, city attorney and certain department heads. ICS isn’t just a command structure, it’s also an incident planning and management tool. ICS really helped Marathon in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, and adherence to the plan and its rules help local governments in getting timely FEMA reimbursements.
After preparations have been completed, there is often a lot of hurry-up-and-wait until the storm approaches. As I write this paragraph, that is what we’re doing at City Hall, waiting on Ian’s passing by the Keys. When the weather hits, however, things can get pretty exciting.
I was mayor during the 2005 hurricane season when we were visited by four storms: Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Katrina was the only one of these that didn’t come with a mandatory evacuation, but that was the storm that sent a tornado down my street at 4 a.m. That was one hell of a wake-up call.
In 2005, Marathon’s City Hall was located in the building near 100th Street, the current location of Ocean Sotheby’s Real Estate and Tewes Mortgage. There were some interesting things that happened while holed up in the building during these four storms — way more interesting than hearing then-City Manager Mike Puto snore during the overnights.
One moment of sheer terror was hearing a large booming crash at the back of the building during a particularly strong wind gust. It was a very large tree branch — about half of that particular tree — that had blown down and hit the back wall and walkway. We were really lucky it didn’t hit the roof. The truly fun part about this particular incident was getting this very large leaf-covered tree-sized branch off the walkway and away from blocking one of our exit doors.
Hurricane Wilma was one of our most destructive storms, and it came through the Keys after we had already been battered by the other three that visited earlier. The windy and rainy part of Wilma came overnight, while everyone at our EOC was asleep — everyone except Fire Chief Hans Wagner and myself. Sometime after midnight, with winds gusting over 100 miles per hour, we discovered that the oceanside storm surge had begun encroaching the parking area under the building. Hans and I moved all the cars from underneath to the elevated parking out front, literally in the middle of a hurricane.
By the time Wilma arrived, most everything that could have been blown down had already been blown down. The trees were all brown, the customary green having either just been damaged by salt spray or simply blown off the tree branches. The next morning, as I was driving around surveying the damage, I noticed water pouring onto the highway where Aviation Boulevard meets U.S. 1 at Coconut Cay. It wasn’t long before the highway behind me turned into a lake and I was forced to find higher ground in the Gulfside Village parking lot.
The rising saltwater storm surge caused a short circuit at one of the buildings of the Reef Resort. As you can probably guess, it caught fire. Because of the amount of Florida Bay that had encroached upon formerly dry land, firefighters used jet skis to carry fire hoses to put out the burning building.
So, as we see the devastating results of Hurricane Ian unfold, I’m sending my thoughts and prayers to the people of Florida’s west coast. And I hope we have no more of these for a long, long time.
– John’s Perpetual Island Tour stops every Monday at Boondocks, Tuesday and Wednesday at the Key Colony Inn, and Thursdays at Sparky’s Landing. Check out John’s music anywhere you stream or download your music! Or point your browser to: johnbartus.hearnow.com
