Put the lessons of Hurricane Michael at work: NPR

As the hurricane season begins, emergency officials and other officials from the Southeast and Gulf Coast apply the lessons learned last year during Hurricane Michael. These lessons include how they evacuate.

Michael was a Category 5 storm that swept the panhandle of Florida with winds of 160 km / h. Lynn Haven, Florida, Mayor of the City, Margo Anderson, was in the city's administrative building to prepare for the storm. The National Hurricane Center warned that Michael was getting stronger and was now at risk of landing as a Category 4 storm with winds of more than 150 km / h. She went on Facebook Live with a message for the 20,000 inhabitants of the city. "If you're in a house that you think will not sustain sustained winds of 100 miles at the hour for several hours tomorrow," she warned, "you still have time to go into shelter."

It turned out that Anderson and other officials of the city's administrative building should have followed this advice. A temporary pavilion now occupies the floor where the administrative building was located. Showing a photo on his cell phone, Anderson says "the hallway where myself and the 40 members of the police department … we found ourselves at the end of the storm."

The roof of the building where they housed disappeared. Debris is everywhere. Insulation and wires hang from the ceiling. A concrete building, she says, and Michael "tore it around us, we survived in the last permanent hallway." The brick and concrete building, built in 1928, was reduced to ruins. Almost all of Lynn Haven's buildings were badly damaged. More than 250 houses were completely destroyed.

Eight months later, Mayor Anderson said that with better information and a little more time, she would do things differently. "If we had known that it would be a category 4 before, everyone would be gone," she said. "If I had known that it would get stronger and we had that kind of forecast before arriving on shore, I would have had my police and firefighters [departments] evacuate too. "

For evacuation emergency managers, there is a worn saying: hide wind; run from the water. Indeed, the vast majority of deaths in hurricanes are people who have drowned in floods, including storm surges. For this reason, while Michael was approaching the city of Panama, Joby Smith, emergency management officer in Bay County, said the evacuations were ordered primarily for areas near the water. He says: "Most evacuation models are based on storm surges, and we also take into account the fact that in our walls, what are the winds like?"

Due to last-minute warnings that Michael could escalate, Bay County has increased mandatory evacuation zones. A traffic assessment conducted after the storm revealed that only 1/5 of the county residents who had been ordered to evacuate had actually done so.

In Mexico Beach, Florida, where Michael landed, the percentage of evacuees is much higher. Only 50 people were known to have landed there. Jay Baker, a researcher and retired professor at Florida State University, who studies hurricane evacuation, said, "The police went door-to-door in Mexico Beach, now it's a small community. by far the most effective way to disseminate evacuation notices. "

Unfortunately, three of the people who stayed in Mexico Beach died under the storm surge. Elsewhere, several people died after being hit by falling trees or debris. Baker says that's one of Michael's reminders: the high winds also kill. "I think there are a lot of people … who are reevaluating whether or not it's advisable to stay back if you're going to have winds like this," Baker said. "Much of the damage was not just about blowing up houses, it was cutting down big trees on houses."

Two people died during the storm in Jackson County, a rural area more than 40 km from the coast and only 50,000 people. Mandatory evacuation has been ordered for people living in mobile homes, accounting for almost one-third of the country. But the director of emergency management in Jackson County, Rodney Andreasen, said that even those who lived in permanent structures made of wood or stone were not safe. "We saw a lot of old buildings, brick buildings in the city that collapsed and were destroyed, and some others were badly damaged, just because of the wind, collapsing. from us, it has just collapsed. "

Andreasen said that buildings located in the panhandle of Florida are simply not designed for winds like those of Hurricane Michael. He says, "I think a lot of people have realized this, and we're going to start seeing that a lot of things are changing because of that."

Among these likely changes: how people prepare for storms, how much evacuation and the strength of new construction on the Florida panhandle will have to be to survive hurricanes like Michael.