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Weather center ready for worst

Inside a tough new $5.1-million building, a Key West hurricane tracking crew can stare in the teeth of a Category 5 and breathe easy.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published May 30, 2006

KEY WEST - They have been stationed at a bank building, a U.S. post office, a hotel and a building at Key West's airport. This hurricane season, staff members of the National Weather Service's Key West office finally have a space of their own: a new $5.1-million building that can withstand a Category 5 hurricane.

That means walls able to take 165-mph winds, hurricane glass windows that will crack but not shatter, all sitting at a height of about 14 feet above sea level, above a large storm surge. Even the building's flagpole is able to withstand Category 5 winds without snapping.

Of the 122 weather forecast offices across the country, this is one of the most secure, but that wasn't always the case.

"You had to make a forecast and bet your life on it, whether you stay or not," said Matt Strahan, meteorologist in charge, of the office's previous location at Key West's airport. Weather observations have been made from various other locations on the island beginning in the late 1800s.

For a good part of the year the office is most concerned with weather forecasts for the shipping routes in the Florida straits. Staffers launch weather balloons twice a day from a tower on the building.

When it's hurricane season, however, Key West residents depend on the local forecasts and warnings the office provides.

"It's very important that they have a presence here," said Cudjoe Key resident James Lowry, who toured the new building recently. "It's very, very important because a lot of the residents down here use that data to determine actions that will be taken during storm season."

The staff moved into the building at the end of last hurricane season in October, less than two weeks before Wilma, but it was unfinished. The new office is a marked improvement from the airport. The office moved there in 1957 and had been at its current location between the Greyhound bus station and customs since 1999.

At the old office, water blew in under the door during high winds, and employees had to put tarps over office equipment to keep it from getting wet.

More nerve-racking were the planes parked on the airport's runways, which would spin around in high winds or even get blown large distances. Cars parked in a nearby parking lot could easily have been picked up by a storm surge and slammed into the building.

"If conditions were severe enough, there was always a chance we would have to bail out," said Andrew Devanas, the science and operations officer at the building.

Now, anything crashing into the side of the office would be stopped by concrete slab walls, and the office even has a bunker area around the bathrooms that can withstand 255 mph winds. During the first hurricane the building weathered, the roof leaked in only one place.

"During Wilma, you could barely tell anything was going on outside," said meteorologist Laura Kasper.

There's also room for the office's staff members to have their families join them during storms.

In the several months since the building has opened, it has attracted a fair amount of attention. Adults and schoolchildren come by for tours, and the building is slowly being decorated with artwork from schoolchildren and local artists.

In the lobby, two hurricane warning flags - red with black squares in the center - have been autographed by the staff that was in the building during Hurricane Wilma, a sort of show of pride that the staff made it through.

"It's kind of like winning your national championship, except we don't really want to collect a lot of them," Kasper said of the flags.

[Last modified May 30, 2006, 05:17:05]