As another hurricane season begins, emergency managers and other officials throughout the Southeast and along the Gulf Coast are applying lessons they learned last year during Hurricane Michael. Those lessons include how they conduct evacuations.
Michael was a Category 5 storm that ripped through Florida’s Panhandle with 160 mph winds. The night before it made landfall, Lynn Haven, Fla., Mayor Margo Anderson was in the city’s administrative building preparing to ride out the storm. The National Hurricane Center warned that Michael was strengthening and was now likely to come ashore as a Category 4 storm with winds over 150 mph. She went on Facebook Live with a message for the town’s 20,000 residents: “If you are in a house that you don’t think will take sustained winds of 100 miles per hour for several hours tomorrow,” she warned, “you still have time to go to a shelter.”
As it turned out, Anderson and other officials in the city’s administrative building should have followed that advice. A temporary pavilion now occupies the ground where the administrative building stood. Showing a picture on her cellphone, Anderson points out “the hallway where myself and the 40 members of the police department … ended up at the end of the storm.”