blahgKarma

Random musings, observations, squeaks, whimpers and perhaps the ocassional rant. About what, I'm not sure.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Hurricane Activations...

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in the Gulf states tonight. We got a taste of hurricane damage last year with Jeanne and Francis, but nothing like the devastation Louisiana and Mississippi are dealing with. I think where its taken a year for things to basically get properties back to normal here in South Florida, it will be years before the recovery and relief efforts wrap up for Katrina along the Gulf and beyond.

There are two local impacts I thought I’d share tonight, both having to do with friends helping with Katrina. First, my friend and our local Fire Chief Tom Billington is one of the Florida Fire Chiefs Association representatives for ESFs 4 & 9, (firefighting and search and rescue) and was activated on the weekend to pull duty in the State of Florida Emergency Operations Center (EOC). I’ll bet they’re scrambling up there to identify needs and task resources to support multi-state search and rescue, assessment and recovery missions. One of the great things about coordinated and integrated emergency management is the ability for command personnel and activities to occur in a “unified command” arrangement, where subject matter experts collaborate to prioritize and focus resources where they’re needed. Hope his work is going well…

EventmakersOn another front, my friends at Eventmakers have a disaster relief and recovery contract with Florida Power and Light, under which they mobilize resources to provide tents (they have the largest portable tent inventory in Florida), tables, chairs and other support gear along with catering and staffing to provide food for FPL’s massive storm response teams. Its a huge and very highly specialized job, but they’ve done it for years and are probably the best in Florida at it. Before the storm hit land, Eventmakers was already staged for deployment, with all the gear and food they needed to support FPL ready to go. FPL pulled the chain today around 10 am, and by 6 pm Eventmakers was serving hot food in Homestead. Unbelievable.

Its hard to imagine the magnitude and significance of impact from this storm. Personal, professional, commercial and economic impacts are huge, and in my opinion won’t be fully understood for a very, very long time.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home