The 20 year anniversary of the epic 1998 Florida disaster year

This month marks the 20^th year anniversary of the epic series of disasters that afflicted the State of Florida in 1998. That year we were activated in the State EOC for 202 days (almost 7 months), a record that wasn’t to be broken until the Deepwater Horizon activation in 2010. The Deepwater Horizon activation was continuous, and I didn’t work every day in that activation, but in the series of disasters that hit Florida in 1998 I think that I worked almost every one of them.

The front sign to the Florida State Emergency Operations Center in 1998. FEMA vehicles are parked on the street in front of the EOC. In 1998 the State EOC was activated a record 202 days.

My disaster epic started in February 1998 while I was driving my daughter to Rickards High School in Tallahassee, as I did most weekday mornings. As always, the car radio was tuned to WFSU, the local public radio station. The radio announced that five tornadoes had hit Central Florida overnight with an undetermined number of deaths (The final death toll from the tornadoes was 42).

“That’s strange,” I commented to my daughter. “You’d think that they would have activated the State EOC.”

Before she could respond, my pager (remember those?) went off. With a practiced motion, I pulled the pager off my belt and handed it to her, keeping my eyes on the road and my other hand on the car wheel.

“What’s it say?” I asked.

“Report to State EOC,” she read off the device.

At that time, I worked for the Florida Department of Agriculture and did my disaster duties with the State Emergency Support 11, Food & Water. I didn’t start working with Emergency Support Function 6, Mass Care until November 1999, when I switched State agencies.

Although I didn’t work in Mass Care my main job was to support the mass care agencies in the field, primarily with truckloads of bottled water and/or ice. Our Agency also controlled the U.S. Department of Agriculture School Lunch Program commodities.

I have a vivid memory from this time of talking on the phone to my friend Kevin Smith, from the Salvation Army. I was at the State EOC and he was on the ground in the middle of the tornado affected area in Central Florida. I remember that he ordered a truck of water and a truck of USDA commodities for a Salvation Army Staging Area. Once these resources arrived, the Salvation Army would distribute the food and water in the affected area using their Canteens.

My friend Kevin Smith of the Salvation Army (2nd from R) holding a cell phone that looks like one of today's satellite phones. Kevin is on scene at one of the locations where destructive tornadoes killed 42 in February 1998.

After we responded to the tornadoes, North Florida started flooding, which was at least a month and a half of boredom waiting for the water to rise and then the water to fall so that the citizenry could go home. And then the wildfires started.

And then in the Fall Hurricane Georges arrived. And yes, Craig Fugate was there the entire time.

What did Katrina teach us about responding to big events?

"But why did we fail? The challenge was both at the local, state, and federal level. We found ourselves too often planning for what we were capable of managing and then hoping it never was any worse. And we thought that if those systems could respond to the day-to-day challenges, we'll scale up in a larger response. And what Katrina demonstrated is you don't scale up. So, you either build for the big events or you're going to fail."


(Craig Fugate's response to a question about what we learned from Katrina, quoted in Politico.com).


Craig said that the key lesson learned from Katrina is that jurisdictions (local, state and federal) must be ready for the big events when they happen if they want to respond in a manner that our elected officials and general public expect. When I put this quote out on social media, some emergency managers responded to the effect: "We can only respond with the resources given to us by our communities, and they aren't focused on Big Events."

I don't think Craig meant that a municipality or a county must stockpile resources sufficient for the Big One. I think that there may be different interpretations of what Craig meant by "build for the big events." No jurisdiction is staffed for a catastrophic event nor will they ever be. Each jurisdiction, I believe, must be prepared to build and staff an organization capable of manging a big event when the time comes.

I'm a State Mass Care Coordinator and I have no budget and no staff. When, not if, the CAT 5 hits Miami I have to be ready to "build for the big event" to meet the enormous increase in quantity and complexity of mass care tasks that must be managed. We must design an organizational structure with written procedures tested and in place to meet this or any other catastrophic event. Personnel to staff this structure would be ordered at the time of the event through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, Mutual Aid and through additional staff provided by the voluntary agencies.

After much time and effort (but little expenditure of funds) that organization and those procedures were created and are available at our State ESF 6 website. We tested and refined those procedures (to include the use of multiple mass care task forces) during the 2012, 2013 and 2014 National Mass Care Exercises held in Tallahassee in conjunction with the State Hurricane Exercise. The AARs for these exercises are on that same web site.

Rather than stockpile resources jurisdictions should plan to acquire the operational coordination capability necessary to manage the resources that will flow in like a tsunami when the Big One happens. The alternative is throw up your hands, tell FEMA to do it all, and then criticize their results.

I wouldn't recommend that second course of action.

FEMA, Catastrophes, and the Whole of Community

During one of the recent Snowmageddon's FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate was severely chastised by a Good Morning America interviewer because he wasn't rushing federal resources to rescue stranded motorists. On the other end of the spectrum are web sites proclaiming that Craig is erecting "FEMA camps" to house citizens who resist federal agents sent to seize their guns (Yes, these sites are there, I saw them).


We have a long way to go on educating the general public about roles and responsibilities in a disaster but after almost two years in charge Craig has finally found the button at FEMA that gets everyone in the organization's attention. He pushed that button and now everyone at FEMA is talking Catastrophes and Whole of Community.


Whole of Community is a concept and a philosophy that goes to the heart of roles and responsibilities in a disaster. Whole of Community means that when a disaster strikes everyone in the community has a role, and everyone must take responsibility for some part of the response and recovery. The more severe the event, i.e. when a disaster becomes a catastrophe, the greater the roles and responsibilities of the individual citizens. In other words, if you are waiting for FEMA to come and pull your car out of a snowdrift, what will be your response when nothing is left of your entire city but rubble and survivors?


The old joke in emergency management says that a disaster is when a tree falls on your neighbor's house, and a catastrophe is when a tree falls on YOUR house. Very few people have experience in catastrophic events. When I was in Hancock County, MS, a few days after Katrina, I ran into someone from the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. He had come to Florida in 2004 to help us on the hurricanes and we were in Mississippi returning the favor. I asked him what happened, and he said they had a plan, but the extent of Katrina's damage had overwhelmed it.


I have heard Craig Fugate many times define an emergency as an event where the responders outnumber the survivors and a disaster as where the survivors outnumber the responders. A catastrophe is where the event overwhelms the plan. The only thing worse than a disaster overwhelming your plan is entering a disaster without any plan at all.

How many jurisdictions today have a catastrophic plan? I don't know, but I don't think very many. The state of Florida has an excellent catastrophic plan. I know, I helped write the mass care feeding and sheltering annex to the plan. Hundreds of local, state and federal workers participated in the development of this plan over a period of several years. The process was one of the most educational and informative periods of my emergency management career.

The person who drove us to write Florida's catastrophic plan? Craig Fugate.

And now Craig wants us all, from small town to big city, from sea to shining sea, to start thinking about catastrophes, and how we can get the whole of the community to pitch in and help when one may happen. I am an emergency manager in one of the most high risk states in the Union. I think about catastrophes all the time, and what I have to do to get ready should one suddenly arrive.

But that's just me.

Craig Fugate is the new head of FEMA

The President announced yesterday that he was nominating Craig Fugate, the Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, to be the Administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. I have known and worked with Craig for over ten years. His appointment to FEMA is a great loss to Florida but a gain for the country.

We received an email yesterday morning stating that Craig had called an "all hands" meeting at the State Emergency Operations Center at 1 P.M. We had heard the rumors that he was up for the job and assumed that this was the big announcement. Over lunch the secret leaked into the media and by the time Craig arrived at the EOC the room was full and expectant.

There were still a number of us in that room who had endured that grueling six weeks in 2004 when the state was hit by four straight hurricanes. The following year we were hit by another four hurricanes, plus the large deployment of Floridians to southern Mississippi after Katrina. But there were a lot of new, young faces in that room, and the hurricanes are still just as big and dangerous, but Craig won't be there with us this summer if the storms come back.

Craig doesn't make long speeches, whether he is praising us or yelling at us. He was full of praise for all of us and for the rest of the State Emergency Response Team. We are recognized around the country as the Super Bowl Champs of state emergency management. There were some old hands, no longer with us, that I wish could have been in that room to hear that speech.

All too quickly Craig was finished and walking out of the room, to a standing ovation from everyone present. I am sad to see him go. When he walked through the door I could feel a part of the burden that he carried shift on to my shoulders. Even Super Bowl Champs are only as good as their last game.