When you hear the phrase "hurricane preparedness," the first things that come to mind may not be the communities of Riverview and Lithia.
Yet in the southern half of Hillsborough County, Riverview and Lithia are the places to be during a hurricane.
There are six hurricane shelters in Hillsborough County south of the Alafia River: Bevis Elementary School and Randall Middle School in Lithia, Cypress Creek Elementary School in Ruskin, Good Samaritan Mission in Wimauma and Riverview High School and Rodgers Middle School in Riverview.
Four of them - Riverview, Rodgers, Bevis and Randall - lie between U.S. 301 and Lithia-Pinecrest Road, all within a 10th of a mile of Boyette Road/Fishhawk Boulevard.
During a recent community plan meeting, Riverview resident Beatriz Till voiced a concern about the strain that much emergency traffic could put on the area.
"Although Boyette Road is no longer designated as an evacuation route, these shelters make it a de facto evacuation route," she wrote to the Planning Commission. "Since the road is already stressed to capacity under normal rush hour, a public safety concern arises."
Till noted that you can't convert Boyette/Fishhawk to a one-way road, since it's one of the main routes between Interstate 75 and the homes in Riverview, Bloomingdale and Lithia.
Good point.
So what's a community to do?
Betty Johnson of the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council, which coordinates the region's hurricane and disaster plans, said they could stagger the opening of those four emergency shelters based on need, so everyone isn't traveling the full stretch of Boyette/Fishhawk all at once.
"That's a challenge, getting thousands of people in their cars and everybody's stressed out," she said. "You can stage your resources so you have all the support you need."
Dennis LeMonde, a spokesman for Hillsborough County's public safety department, said county sheriff's deputies would be called in case of a hurricane to facilitate the flow of traffic and navigate families from home to shelter and back.
"If we don't activate all of the shelters - if we only opened up certain ones based on whatever the situation was - we would say we're going to need somebody to go out there and make sure those areas are secure and traffic's flowing," he said.
So provided tsunamis aren't pouring out of the Alafia River, emergency traffic on Boyette Road and Fishhawk Boulevard shouldn't be that bad.
Now, if only something could be done about traffic throughout the rest of the year.
FOLLOWING ANY MAJOR HOLIDAY, you always read reports on the number of traffic citations, DUIs, speeding tickets and boating violations issued by law authorities.
What you never hear about, though, are the other holiday-related accidents. Here, for your axie consideration, are two of them.
Case 1: On July 4, a car was traveling down Interstate 75 in Riverview, its passengers presumably on their way to a neighborhood cookout.
Suddenly, the driver slammed on the brakes. There, in the right lane, was a party-size cooler.
The car swerved across traffic and into the median, clipping another car on the way.
If only it hadn't been July 4, that cooler may have still been sitting in someone's garage, collecting spiderwebs until Labor Day.
Case 2: On July 5, a Tampa man was driving south on Interstate 275 in Tampa when something jolted his pickup truck.
In his rearview mirror, he saw his barbecue grill tumbling out of his truck bed and into another car.
The man was cited, since the grill wasn't securely fastened. But at least the grill fell July 5, instead of on his way to an Independence Day picnic.
Somewhere, a highway pickup crew might be having a heck of a barbecue, thanks to the ex-owners of the grill and the cooler.
All they need is a Budweiser truck to rear-end the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, and they'll be set for Labor Day.
- The Lane Ranger is currently stuck in traffic. But he can be reached at 661-2442 or cridlin@sptimes.com
