A little less than 30 hours before the hurricane was projected to hit nearby, on a Wednesday morning, Brevard County instructed its vulnerable residents to evacuate. They opened 15 shelters and prepared for the worst. But by Friday morning, the storm had deviated slightly from its projected track, remaining just offshore, leaving the area, and much of the state, with less damage than expected.
A palpable excitement from residents who narrowly missed major damage from a severe hurricane could rightfully be expected. Not so, said Brevard County's operations coordinator, John Scott. Instead, he found complaints of inconvenience. It was as if people wanted to come back to devastation, he said, shaking his head.
"People learned the wrong lessons," Scott said during a presentation at the Governor's Hurricane Conference in West Palm Beach. "The damage wasn't as bad as forecast, so they think no big deal next time."
That attitude is something state and local emergency management officials are battling heading into the six-month 2017 hurricane season that begins Thursday. Hurricane experts initially predicted this would be a below-average season, but changing conditions have led them to say it could potentially be more active.
Although many people associate Florida with hurricanes, the state had gone an unprecedented 10 years without one making landfall by the start of the 2016 hurricane season, more than double the previous longest lull. There had been a number of near misses, but Florida escaped with only some tropical storm hits during that period.
But last year, relatively late in the season, that streak was broken. In early September, Hurricane Hermine struck north Florida, doing most of its damage in the Big Bend area and Panhandle, though it brought prodigious amounts of rain to much of the rest of the state. Estimates in Sarasota County put wind and rain damage at almost $700,000, with nearly 100 area properties affected.
Although Hurricane Matthew did not make landfall in the state, it caused considerable damage as it skirted the coastline on the way to the Carolinas. It was the only hurricane ever to hit Cuba, Haiti and the Bahamas. Generally, hurricanes lessen in strength once they hit one of those mountainous, rocky islands. But that was not the case with Matthew.
"It basically found the smallest amount of possible coastline," said Colorado State University meteorologist Philip Klotzbach.
In affecting northeast Florida, Matthew caused more than $1 billion in damage, including 112,000 individual property damage claims across counties including Brevard and Flagler. In Brevard alone, there was $35 million in residential property damage, and 11 homes were destroyed.
Still, it would have been far worse if the storm had turned west, causing several times as much damage.
Matthew prompted one of the larger evacuations the state has seen in recent years, said Bryan Koon, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. Overall officials are pleased with how it went. As is the case after all storms, emergency managers evaluate what went well, what didn't and what can be improved.
"We did a fairly large-scale evacuation from the east coast for Matthew, and that went pretty well," Koon said. "It happened efficiently, effectively, and less people anticipated stayed in shelters. You don't need to evacuate all the way across the state."
Less shelter demand
It seems as if officials' warnings over recent years calling emergency shelters a last resort were heeded by the public, even more than emergency management officials had assumed. About 25,000 to 30,000 people sought emergency shelters in the state during Hermine and Matthew, according to Andrew Sussman, the Florida Division of Emergency Management's hurricane program manager. While planners historically prepare for 5-10 percent of the population being housed in shelters during an emergency, experience in recent years has shown that only one to three percent of the population uses shelters.
Local officials who spoke at the hurricane conference echoed that same sentiment. Nassau County's emergency management director, William Estep, noted that there was a "low utilization" of shelters, especially compared with numbers in past years, when there had been a "shelter deficit." In all, about 350 people stayed in that county's shelters.
"It showed probably a low evacuation compliance from Duval County," Estep said, referring to the neighboring county. "We always anticipated that folks, particularly on the north end of the county, would wind up coming to Nassau to seek shelter."
One major change since the last hurricane to make landfall in the state, 2005's Hurricane Wilma, is social media. With its rise comes an increased desire from residents for individualized information suited to their location and situation.
During Hurricane Matthew, Brevard County emergency management sent more than 300 tweets and Facebook posts, garnering 2.7 million impressions in a three-week period, said the county's emergency management director, Kimberly Prosser.
Prosser received so many emails from residents during Matthew that she had to hand over her account to a few county officials, so they could attempt to answer the onslaught of correspondence.
The state's Division of Emergency Management sent nearly 7 million messages to residents, either through text messages or phone calls, Koon said.
In Manatee County, residents can call the Citizens Action Center with a concern rather than reaching out directly to a county department. That served emergency management well during Hermine and Matthew, when they could devote full-time staffers and volunteers to answering calls and responding to social media.
But Nassau County's Estep wondered if the sheer amount of information available could overwhelm residents, making them feel capable of deciding on their own whether they should stay or go.
"We are getting to the point where we are putting the citizens at a decision-making point, giving them so much information that the expectation is we want them to make a decision as opposed to listening to us as the experts in the field," Estep said. "I'm not really sure where we go."
Evacuation psychology
Koon said the state is always learning from its experiences with evacuating large numbers of people — and getting them back home smoothly — and last year was no exception.
"People won't have unpleasant memories of not being able to get home for days on end — they will be more prone to evacuate the next time," he said.
While the constant influx of newcomers to Florida is a source of emergency managers' concerns about preparedness, the Weather Channel's Bryan Norcross said perhaps a bigger concern should be current residents who think they have survived the worst a major hurricane can offer and see no reason to evacuate, even though they only saw fringe effects.
"I don't find it to be a problem getting new people motivated to take action and pay attention when a storm is threatening," said Norcross, who covered Hurricane Andrew as a television reporter in the 1992. "What is more challenging is people saying, 'I went through Hurricane Andrew in Fort Lauderdale, so I know what hurricanes can do and I'm not going to evacuate.' That's the harder evacuation task."
It's an ongoing problem emergency management must address each year: how to properly communicate the need to evacuate in a way that will convince people to leave when needed and to seriously prepare.
"The big message is, don't take storm season for granted and make sure you're planning and that you have the supplies," said Sarasota County's emergency management chief, Ed McCrane. "Wait until the last minute, and the store shelf will be empty."
In an effort to arm residents with more information, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Hurricane Center has created a number of new products for the upcoming season, including storm surge watches and warnings and information on potential tropical cyclone formation.
Experts often repeat the same mantras: Run from the water, hide from the wind. Go tens of miles, not hundreds of miles in an evacuation. And perhaps the most stressed — have a plan.
You can almost hear the "please" at the end of that sentence.
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