State clears only 5 schools as shelters

The others don't meet new hurricane safety standards. To compensate, the state urges residents to stay with friends.

By ALISA ULFERTS

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 30, 2000

If a hurricane threatens Miami-Dade County this year, Pasco County could open enough schools to shelter 11,162 evacuees.

Should that hurricane threaten Tampa Bay, however, only 5,820 shelter spaces will open for Pasco residents needing to flee storm and surge.

Why? Because a recent change in hurricane shelter standards disqualified all but five of the schools Pasco had planned to use as shelters.

State emergency management officials inspected the schools and decided most either had too many windows, too few reinforced bars in the walls or a roof span too wide to be supported in high winds.

So while some of those schools still can be used to host people escaping disasters in other parts of the state, they can't be counted on to keep residents safe should a storm strike here, said Emergency Mangement Director Michele Baker.

"This just underscores a message we've been trying to get out: It's so important that people go to friends and family," Baker said. Shelters are a last resort only for people who have no other place to go, she added.

Almost 120,000 Pasco residents live west of U.S. 19 or in a mobile home and generally are advised to evacuate even for moderately weak storms. Baker said her staff is scrambling to find other buildings to use as shelters and plans to retrofit some of the schools, many of which need a simple fix such as window shutters.

Pasco is not alone. Across the state, counties are losing local shelter spaces at a time when the state is urging people not to leave their region during a hurricane unless they are ordered to evacuate.

"If you have enough food in your house for two or three days, you're far better off at home" as long as you take simple precautions like putting up shutters, said Jim Loftus, a spokesman for the state Division of Emergency Management.

Loftus said the state wants to prevent the kind of gridlock that occurred on the state's freeways last year when between 2-million and 3-million people tried to get away from Hurricane Floyd, a monster storm that brushed Florida's coast and killed 56 people in the United States and another in the Bahamas.

Only 1.3-million of those people actually were advised to evacuate.

"A million more people left than should have," Loftus said. The state could start reverse-laning major roads, meaning both lanes of traffic would flow in the same direction, to ease the way for those who must evacuate. Parts of Interstate 75 have been considered for reverse-laning.

But first, Pasco's coastal residents must get to I-75. The county's deficit of major east-west routes can make it that much harder for those evacuating, especially if there won't be many shelter spaces available locally. And one of the planned routes that was proposed to ease east-west travel -- the Ridge Road extension -- is being challenged by a collection of environmental and managed-growth advocates.

Still, Red Cross officials defended their decision not to staff buildings that don't meet their new standards, unless it's for victims of a disaster far away.

"These are based on safety concerns. It's not that we just don't want to open shelters," said Gene Ritter, director of emergency services for the Tampa Bay chapter of the Red Cross.

"If you know the roof can come off, do you say, "Well, maybe the wind won't be as strong as we think'?" Ritter said.

Ritter said he doubts that the loss of shelters across the state will have much of an impact on evacuation patterns. During Hurricane Floyd, when armies of cars clogged interstates heading north and west, the Red Cross had many shelters open all along that route but a bit farther inland.

"Not one of them was full," Ritter said.

Jay Baker, a professor at Florida State University who has studied evacuation patterns and human reaction to disasters, agreed that the higher shelter standards probably won't have too great an effect on evacuation patterns because too many people already evacuate.

"People go farther than they have to," the professor said. Communities with a deficit of shelter space would be wise to start a public education program designed to encourage people who live outside evacuation zones to invite their coastal friends and acquaintances to stay with them.

That wouldn't have worked for Carol Hambley. Less than 48 hours after undergoing a mastectomy at Community Hospital of New Port Richey, Hambley had a problem.

Hurricane Georges was headed toward the gulf coast after killing more than 500 people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and Hambley's neighborhood had been ordered to evacuate. Bandaged, weak and with no time left to make other plans, Hambley reported to a medical shelter staffed by the Red Cross.

Because of her susceptibility to infection, Hambley was isolated away from where the elderly and sick slept in rows alongside their oxygen tubes and IV drips

"They were very concerned about infection and people bumping into me," Hambley said.

Should a hurricane threaten Pasco this year, Hambley plans to stay with a friend who lives off Little Road. But she's worried about the people she met during Georges who depend on shelters, especially since Pasco has lost two of its four medical-needs shelters.

"I'm very concerned. ... I know they don't have many shelters for the medically needy."

Baker, Pasco's emergency management director, said the county may start out hurricane season 2000 short on medical-needs beds, but that will quickly change once the county begins retrofitting some of its shelters.

Because Pasco has operated for quite a while with a shelter-space deficit, Baker said, her staff is constantly on the lookout for other buildings that can be used for shelters. If Pasco gets the enough state funding -- Gov. Jeb Bush has proposed spending $18-million this year on hurricane shelter retrofitting -- Baker said she hopes to add 10,858 shelter spaces over the next two years.

Not wanting to wait until the state conducted its shelter spot checks -- only 31 of Florida's 67 counties have been surveyed so far -- Baker hired a consultant to see if Pasco's schools met the tougher shelter standards.

Post, Buckley, Schuh & Jernigan's report suggested six of the 27 shelters failed the state's criteria completely, several others could be retrofitted to meet the criteria, and 15 had some capacity but could increase it with retrofitting. But that study assumed that many of the older schools had reinforced bars in the walls. State surveyors found that they did not, Baker said.

Baker plans to update county commissioners on the state's survey Tuesday.

Commissioner Steve Simon said he's concerned not only by the dwindling shelter space, but also by the fear that Pasco residents won't heed evacuation warnings after the county's experiences last year. Twice an evacuation was called when a storm appeared headed toward Pasco, and twice those storms veered off in another direction.

"I think it's a boy cries wolf syndrome," Simon said.

"How many more times do you do that and lose percentage points of people along the way who heed the warning ... before something really big hits?"

Schools available for hurricane shelters

Here are the schools that Pasco may use as hurricane shelters for the 2000 hurricane season:

School	Location	Capacity
River Ridge Middle/High School	New Port Richey	1,046
Pineview Middle School	Land O'Lakes	173
Thomas E. Weightman Middle School	Wesley Chapel	667
Wesley Chapel High School	Wesley Chapel	3,230
Saint Leo University	Saint Leo	704
Total:		5,820

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