October 12, 2024 Tampa Chief Lee Bercaw and Asheville Chief Mike Lamb on Hurricanes Milton and Helene
PERF members, As you’re all aware, two weeks ago Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern part of the United States, then Hurricane Milton hit Florida overnight Wednesday. For this week’s column, I spoke with two chiefs from cities affected by these storms. On Tuesday I spoke to Tampa Chief Lee Bercaw about the steps his city was taking to prepare for Hurricane Milton. And on Thursday I spoke to Asheville, NC, Chief Mike Lamb about his community’s efforts to recover from Hurricane Helene. Tampa Chief Lee Bercaw Chuck Wexler: How do you prepare for a storm like this? Chief Lee Bercaw: It’s tough. We’ve had storms. We’ve had hurricanes. But I was born and raised in the Tampa Bay area, and there has never been a storm of the significance and potential impact of the one headed this way. And it’s coming on the heels of Hurricane Helene. So it’s monumental, but we have all the plans in place. We always knew this day would come, and it’s about executing the plan. Right now, it’s about what we can do pre-storm, which is evacuation and trying to save lives by getting people to heed our warnings. Because I’m afraid that when the storm passes, we’ll have many people who decided not to evacuate and unfortunately did not make it through the storm. Wexler: How much of the city are you evacuating? Chief Bercaw: The Tampa Bay area has roughly three million residents, and the city of Tampa has about a half million people. In the city of Tampa, we have lettered zones. Zone A would be the first to flood, Zone B would be the second, and so forth, down through E. If you look at Tampa on a map, you would see a southern peninsula, which is South Tampa. Zones A and B are basically that entire peninsula, which includes the entire downtown. And we have Harbour Island and Davis Island, which are adjacent to downtown. All of that would be underwater with a 15-foot storm surge. Map of Tampa’s evacuation zones, with Zone A in red and Zone B in orange. Source: Hillsborough County, Florida. Wexler: How many people are in Zones A and B? Chief Bercaw: We estimate about 200,000. Wexler: How do you evacuate that many people? Do you do public announcements? Send officers out into the community? Work with community organizations? Chief Bercaw: All of the above. Had we not had Hurricane Helene about a week and a half ago, I’m not sure we would be getting the cooperation that we’re getting now. Helene didn’t hit us directly, but we had a seven- to eight-foot storm surge. People were trapped in their houses, and they were calling us in the middle of the night. We received more than 200 calls from people who had water coming into their houses and wanted us to come and assist. In many cases, we couldn’t get to them. Had they not experienced that, I don’t think we’d be getting the cooperation we’re getting now. We share the message through media outlets, social media, the emergency operations center, and door-to-door notifications. We can see people are complying because even yesterday all the interstates leaving downtown were jam-packed.
Tampa Mayor Jane Castor, Weather Channel Meteorologist Jim Cantore, and Tampa Chief Lee Bercaw put out a video message encouraging people to evacuate before the storm. Source: City of Tampa on X. Wexler: What do you tell your officers? What preparations should they be making? Chief Bercaw: I had 11 officers’ families impacted by Hurricane Helene, with their houses flooded, and we had to help relocate them. So we’re already feeling significant impacts. The Tampa Bay community is great. We’ve had many people come together to assist those officers and provide donations. Starting this morning, we started our alpha/bravo shifts, which is our full hurricane deployment. So the entire department is coming into work, and they will stay with us for three to four days. They’re leaving their families, leaving their houses, and hunkering down with us. They stay in several locations throughout the city. Our primary location is Raymond James Stadium, where the Buccaneers play. About a third of our department is there, along with some military personnel from MacDill Air Force Base. And we bring many of our assets here – our helicopters, our boats, our command posts – so they’ll be safe during the storm, then we can bring them out and use them immediately for our recovery efforts. Wexler: How do you plan to manage your time during the storm? Chief Bercaw: I have a great command staff, and you have to trust them to know their roles. I can’t be everywhere and anywhere. So I’ll try to pop around, go to different roll calls, check on officers and their morale, and go out and talk to the community. Just today I was out with officers assisting with evacuations. So I’m trying to reach people, see how they’re doing, and reassure them that we’re going to be here for them and keep them safe. And I’ll be maintaining our partnerships. I spoke to the sheriffs in our own county and adjacent counties, police chiefs all around the area, and even police chiefs elsewhere in Florida who aren’t in the direct line of impact. They’re ready to come assist immediately after the storm. Wexler: And I understand your mayor just got a call from the President? Chief Bercaw: Yes, she was on the phone with him for about half an hour to talk about some of our needs. He asked what we needed most, and she talked about all the debris we had from Hurricane Helene and how we needed additional resources to help get that removed before Milton hits. Typically, after a hurricane there is debris scattered everywhere, and people bring it out from their residences to their yards. It can take up to a month to clear that, and we’ve been working with the city to get the majority of it cleared from the residences. But we’re not going to clear all of it before the storm, and with 150-mile-per-hour winds, those are going to be flying missiles in our neighborhoods. Source: Chief Lee Bercaw Wexler: Is there anything else you’d like to add? Chief Bercaw: The easier part of this is the preparation and getting people to evacuate. The harder part is going to be Thursday, when we see how our city has been devastated. I was talking to the mayor on a conference call last night with some of our command staff and city leaders, and you could hear in her voice that she’s getting ready to see her city devastated. That was bone-chilling. But our officers are out here and are all optimistic and have great attitudes. So we’re ready for Thursday, and we’ll be grateful for the resources and help we get to assist us afterwards. A Tampa emergency responder uses a drone to assess storm damage. Source: City of Tampa on X. Note: On Thursday morning, Chief Bercaw updated me with the following text: “We made it through the storm, and we were very fortunate for its last-minute righthand turn. This kept us from receiving the storm surge that we thought we were going to get. We do have lots of powerlines down, trees in the street, and numerous intersections without power, but other than that we fared extremely well.” Asheville Chief Mike Lamb Chuck Wexler: When did you realize how serious the situation in Asheville would be? Chief Mike Lamb: We had hurricane-force winds reach us, then we had the flood waters surge. Our dam at the North Fork Reservoir reached capacity, and they have a bucket system that automatically dumps water so the dam doesn’t break. Once we realized that the water was going to start coming over the dam, we realized we were in really bad shape. The night before, Thursday the 26th, we had a voluntary evacuation, so we put that messaging out. Then at 6 a.m. on Friday the 27th, there was a mandatory evacuation alert because of flash flooding along the Swannanoa River and the French Broad River. We joined with the Asheville Fire Department and some of our regional volunteer fire departments to start evacuating people. We called in our detectives, and they joined with the fire department to evacuate. I think we evacuated over 500 people from the river areas and lowlands to make sure they were safe. And even with those evacuations, we had a lot of lives lost because people stayed in their homes and never thought the river would reach them. Officer Reginald Pierre guarding a bridge destroyed by flooding. Source: Asheville Police Department Wexler: How did you manage your police officers? Chief Lamb: Everybody from the night shift stayed over, and they worked about 16 to 17 hours straight. Power went out and all our cell service went out , so some officers didn’t even know if their family members were safe. But they were still at work making sure the city of Asheville was safe as flood waters rose. Wexler: What plans did you have in place for a natural disaster? And how did you manage the loss of cell service? Chief Lamb: We had started the planning process back in June for any kind of emergency event. We had two plans. One’s called a COOP, or continuity of operations plan. With that, we know that if one person’s out in a certain role, there’s somebody else to fill that role. And we create annexes, so if a facility goes out due to flooding or tornado or whatever, there’s an alternate location for us to run operations out of. We also built a new emergency operations center at one of the brand-new fire stations. Our emergency operations for this even ran out of there continuously, and we started a phone tree. Each department had a phone tree to check on their people and make sure everyone was safe. So we were able to eventually confirm that 100 percent of the police department and city employees in general were safe. Captain Jonathan Brown showing Asheville Councilwoman Antanette Mosley flood damage. Source: Asheville Police Department. Wexler: What does Asheville’s recovery look like today? Chief Lamb: We are two weeks into the process, and we have a long way to go. Our water system was catastrophically damaged. Several water mains were washed out. One water bypass was 20 feet underground, and the water cut so deep that it was well below that bypass line. So we have to use our incident management team to help rebuild infrastructure. Thankfully, we’ve had state and federal representatives come visit to see what kind of aid they can give. The state just passed an emergency funding bill for western North Carolina to help us rebuild infrastructure. Chief Mike Lamb with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Congressman Chuck Edwards in Biltmore Village. Source: Asheville Police Department. And we have worked through our missing persons list. With cell service down, we got an influx of emails reporting people as missing. Most were family members from other states or regions who couldn’t get a hold of someone. We had about 400 messages, and we were able to whittle that list down. I think we may have around 10 folks who are unhoused that we’ve not accounted for, and we have one who is presumed deceased because he was seen going into the water and another we were able to confirm deceased through DNA. The FBI has been a great partner in helping us with our DNA analysis and fingerprints on the deceased folks coming into the morgue. That’s helped us get closure for the families who lost people. Detective Jose Otero and Sgt. John Flynn of the NYPD Emergency Service Unit traveled to Asheville to assist with recovery efforts. Wexler: What recommendations would you give chiefs to prepare for something like this? Chief Lamb: One thing that’s helped us tremendously is having relationships with community stakeholders and different emergency operations directors across the local area and region. We’ve been able to connect and combine resources. It also helped to get that incident management team on the ground early to help us set up our emergency operations center. Having that organization helped streamline the process. We were not prepared for managing the influx of outside agencies that arrived. So I’d recommend that any department have a team of people – at least five – working 24 hours a day to track the resources coming in. Track their arrival time, departure time, and if they’re staying at a hotel or a FEMA base camp. It was difficult to manage the first few days, but once we got our system down, it went smoother, and we reduced frustrations. Another thing is to make sure you have embedded clinicians and some type of wellness resources for your employees. We have responder support services, who are embedded clinicians that have been with us since 2018. Officers already have a relationship with them, and they’ve been able to help some officers through personal loss, such as damage to their homes. We’ve had a lot of detectives doing body recovery for days, 12 to 14 hours a day. It’s important to have resources for them. One of the clinicians recommended they do something else for a bit, so these detectives spent some time working with a chainsaw crew cutting up trees. One of the detectives told me it was therapeutic to cut branches with a chainsaw and not have to think about the task they had been doing. So it’s been valuable to have embedded clinicians and mental health resources. Detective Captain Joe Silberman searching for human remains in a flood-damaged building. Source: Asheville Police Department Thanks to Chief Bercaw and Chief Lamb for taking the time to speak with me, and our thoughts are with all those affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Best, Chuck |