We're launching this podcast to give you updated headlines and stories as we have them from across the Southeast in this critical time. Hopefully this will be helpful to you and your family. I'm Rory O'Neill. When Hurricane Dorian stalled over the Bahamas for two days, it just pounded the area with wind gusts over two hundred miles an hour and feet of rain, And after skirting the Florida coast and clipping the Carolinas, the storm is on the move now moving over twenty miles an hour away from the
US towards Canada and finally just falling apart. But as Dorian moves away, we're getting a better look at what's been left behind in the Bahamas again and everybody set up in the ceiling for two days of water in my house. I right now I'm added into the city of refuge, So keep us in the Bahamas. Everybody's like in a state of shop right now. We lost everything, So right now we just say, right now, one guy has more experience cleaning up after a hurricane than any other,
Craig few Gap. He used to run emergency management for the State of Florida. That was during the busy hurricane seasons of two thousand four and two thousand five. Oh five was the year they ran out of letters at the National Hurricane Center. So after working in Tallahassee, he was tapped by President Obama to be his FEMA director, And there were plenty of disasters on his watch then too, but few. Gate, former firefighter, is a tough love kind of a guy. He'll tell it to you straight and
he won't sugarcoat it. People think you're gonna get everything done. It's a disaster folks. Right now. We're just trying to keep them a lot. They're not happy because they don't have eyes. Good if they're not happy, they're breathing, they have an airway, they're communicating, and they're alive. I have a acomplished my primary goal. That's from a speech that
Fegate gave to Verizon workers. But he's been in the field plenty too, in situations like Hurricane Maria, when the death toll kept climbing, reaching about three thousand a quarter to some reports. And I think that's the thing you have to focus on, is what are we counting h If you look at just direct impacts in Florida, we had fewer people killed by the storms than we did
had dying after the storm. When you look at what happened to Maria, you look at the disruption of infrastructure, people cut off, running out of critical supplies, running out of critical medical equipment, not being able to get access to medical equipment and proper treatments. That death toll makes sense. It's how we count. And I think the sematics doesn't really do justice to the lives loss and more importantly,
why did people die? Because if we don't understand that lesson of what we can do differently, we're not going to change the outcome in the future. And Puerto Ricans feared a repeat of Hurricane Maria as Hurricane Dorian came charging towards their small island, But instead Dorian slipped by hid in the island with just thirty mile winds and three to four inches of rain, causing no real damage at all. And that's why forecasters have that cone of uncertainty.
It's a way to hedge their bets in case some system decides to make a quick turn to the left or right, north or south. I remember back in two thousand four, Hurricane Charlie was making a Bee Line towards what was supposed to be Tampa Bay. I was standing there waiting for the storm to arrive late at night Friday of August, as a matter of fact, in St. Pete Beach in the dark with some blustery winds, and doesn't Charlie go and take a sudden turn to the right.
At the time, I had a house in Orlando. In fact, I had just bought it and hadn't even made my first mortgage payment. So here I am standing in St. Pete Beach, drives a bone and now my house is getting hit with winds of a hundred miles an hour. I hadn't even taken time to bring in the grill or a potted plant because the storm wasn't supposed to go that way at all. So and I made the harrowing drive back through the storm along Interstate four to get back to my house. Sun was coming up just
as I got there. I remember pulling into the driveway seeing shingles all over my lawn, and really I just almost was in tears at that point. So as I looked at those shingles on the lawn and where they had hit the house and left some pock marks, and scratch marks all along the paint. I noticed that the tiles were brown, and then I looked up and I realized the tiles on my roof were black. My roof was fine. It was the neighbor's roof who was gone.
But I hadn't prepared, and in the end just got pretty lucky because my house wasn't damaged by Hurricane Charlie. Plenty of others were like the neighbor who had to get a whole new roof, and I didn't even lose power in our neighborhood. I was the envy of actually everyone I knew, since Hurricane Charlie knocked out power for weeks to some folks had friends coming over to my house just to do the laundry, and we had cookouts just so they could get some refrigeration and air conditioning.
That's something else you don't think of when a hurricane rolls around. After it knocks out the power, there you are in that floorida heat, usually over at ninety degrees, with humidity, no electricity, and a lot of sweat because there's no air conditioning. And yes, you can groan about it, but it's actually dangerous too. Just a couple of years ago. It was a different hurricane that knocked out the power in Fort Lauderdale. That's where a nursing home lost power
and fourteen people died. The medical examiner blamed twelve of those deaths on the heat because there was no generator, no backup, no plan B Now, for people who work at that nursing home or facing criminal charges, it could be well over a year before those cases actually go
to trial if they do. And the state did pass new regulations requiring nursing homes to have backup systems, either generators or plans to evacuate residents just in case the power goes out and there's no more a c A lot of nursing homes have complied, but others are asking for a delay and many patients are still vulnerable. It's something the state of Florida still grapples with. In North Carolina, some of the building restrictions that were put into place
after earlier hurricanes are being eased. They may be having second thoughts now after Hurricane Dorian clipped a patteris with wind gusts around ninety miles an hour. The damage assessments will be coming out in the next day or so, but there will be lots of beach erosion and lots of clean up to perform. Disaster planning can be complicated. It's easy when it's a family of four and their solid incomes. They have that SUV. They can load up and go to a friend's house or book a hotel
a hundred miles away and be just fine. They're easy. But what happens when people have extended relatives who need medical care, a baby and infant, someone who's pregnant, someone with diabetes or another chronic condition, maybe being on oxygen, have to have electricity all the time, And what do you do about the family dog, the family cat, the family fish, maybe a turtle, maybe a ferret, maybe even a horse. That's more common than you think. And evacuating
isn't always cheap. You assume a person has a car, maybe they need public transportation, Maybe they have no where else to go, maybe their new in town. Maybe maybe maybe there are just endless possibilities. And these are endless concerns faced by emergency managers at the local level every time there's this warm just like Hurricane Dorian. Look at the situation now in the Bahamas. Thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands of people permanently homeless. Where do they go?
The United States is just a short flight away, but who pays? Do you let them in the country? Do they even have a photo? I d And do you break up a family because one member does and a child does not? The point is, disasters are not one size fits all, and while it's good to give a case of water or donate diapers or other baby supplies, that barely scratches the surface. And there are always new
disasters and new distractions. You may have forgotten. It was only a year ago that the Florida Pamhandle was battered by Hurricane Michael, another Cat five storm system. The area near Mexico Beach essentially flattened and needs a total rebuild. But it's not in the headlines much anymore, and next week marks the peak of the hurricane season. There's a lot more to go. The annual storm season runs through No will continue to update this feed with stories on
Hurricane Dorian until then, Stay safe. I'm Rory O'Neill.