Florida Emergency Responders Get the Word Out About 'Hurricane Herb'

This past week, emergency managers and support personnel across the Florida from both state and county governments successfully completed an exercise designed to evaluate their ability to get information out to the public across multiple channels in the event of a hurricane.

The Florida Hurricane Exercise is an annual event that gives emergency managers and support personnel from state and county governments an opportunity to test their plans and try out new systems to improve their ability to respond to disasters.

One of the systems tested during the exercise was an emergency communications system operated by America's Emergency Network. AEN's goal is to be sure that every emergency manager, whether from a large county or a small town, has an outlet to reach the public, the media, and other government officials. AEN's satellite-based system is designed to continue to work after a disaster when the power lines, phone lines, cell phone towers, and terrestrial Internet systems are knocked out.

On Monday, June 2, 2008, Craig Fugate, Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, led the opening briefing on "Hurricane Herb," the virtual hurricane created for the exercise. The briefing was streamed live on the custom AEN web page built for the state's emergency center. On the same day in the afternoon, AEN was deployed again, this time to feed live news briefings from Putnam County and Jacksonville/Duval County in northeast Florida, counties designated to be in the path of "Hurricane Herb." The counties' emergency management and support personnel rehearsed their emergency procedures, including simulated news briefings. Those briefings were fed live to the state emergency operations center in Tallahassee, demonstrating how information will flow during a real hurricane emergency.

The exercise continued through Wednesday, June 4. At the end of the exercise, AEN was scheduled to broadcast additional live briefings from the Florida emergency center and Putnam County. In addition, the town of Islamorada in the Florida Keys was also scheduled to send its first briefing over America's Emergency Network, which will be monitored in Tallahassee as well.

"This gives us a chance to stretch our system and find new and better ways to do things," said Director Craig Fugate. "The more information we have in real-time, the better our response can be," he added.