May 9, 2025 • 26 mins
It's not hard to protect your family and property from the impact of tropical storms and hurricanes. Here are the basics, including tips you might not have thought about! With Assistant Fire Chief Brent Bloomfield.
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(10:27:42):
I'm Jerry Marcello. Welcome to the City
Center podcast from West
Palm Beach, Florida. Hurricane
season is here. What do you need to do to
prepare? How can you stay safe and how do
you protect your family? We'll talk about
it next on the City
Center podcast from West
Palm Beach. And joining me today is Brent
(10:28:04):
Bloomfield, assistant fire
chief for the City of West
Palm Beach. Brent,
thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having me. We talked about
this before many,
many times, but it always
bears repeating. Preparation is the key
to surviving a storm.
What does that entail?
What does it do? What should people here
locally be thinking
about? I think the number one
thing is knowing the hurricane season. It
(10:28:25):
starts on June 1st. It
runs through November
30th. And what we've seen is in the last
few years, we've seen
these hurricane seasons
just get more and more devastating. We're
starting to see a change
in how these hurricanes
are ramping up, rapid intensification. So
with that being said,
you want to make sure
that you're prepared for the worst case
scenario. What is worst
case scenario? Well, worst case
scenario is we have a cat fight like
(10:28:47):
Dorian bearing down on
us, but it doesn't make that
turn. It comes right across us, like a
hurricane, Andrew, or on the
West Coast, we've seen Michael
and we've seen Ian and we see, I mean, a
ton of different
storms. So the preparation is
very simple. Make sure that your house is
in order. Number one, inside and outside,
make sure that the trees are trimmed,
make sure that
(10:29:07):
everything that can be picked up
is picked up. Then things that are easily
moved, make sure you
have somewhere to take
them whenever a storm comes inside the
house. Make sure that
you have plenty of food and
water for the event. Start that now, not
two days before the
storm. You get perishable
food items that you'll eat later, water
that you're going to
drink later. You can always
drink it later. You can always eat
perishable food later. You
(10:29:29):
know, things like peanut butter,
and jelly, things like canned foods,
canned meat, like tuna,
those are always good things.
Make sure that your medication is up to
date and you can run it
through for, if you have
to get a 90 day supply, get a 90 day
supply if that can run
you through. Make sure if
we have a storm that's going to be coming
that you don't wait
till the day before to
(10:29:49):
fill those prescriptions. Make sure you
get them done early. Make
sure that all your paperwork
is in order, especially your insurance
paperwork. Make sure that's in a
watertight bag, easy
to get to, because once the storm clears,
you know, and you
start to, you know, we're
out of the phase of the 72 hours where
we're in a phase of we're
responding, we're trying
to save people, then the recovery starts,
(10:30:11):
right? So the recovery
part for you as a citizen
is you want to make sure that you get a
hold of your insurance
company if you have any
damage and you want to make sure that
your paperwork's in
order. So it's an easy, easy
transition for you.
I think a lot of people make the mistake
or they get the mental
idea that, "Oh, I'll just
call it up on my phone or I'll be on my
PC." We might not have power
for a long time afterwards.
(10:30:31):
Well, we may not have power or signal. So
that was one of the
things that we ran into
in Hurricane Michael when we were in the
Panhandle. We had a 20
mile area that was, there was
no signal at all. When you have no
signal, that means you have no
communication. So you
think that you're going to just be able
to pull these things
up on your phone because
that's what we're used to, right? You
know, 20 years ago,
everything was hard paper. You
(10:30:52):
had everything in folders, that kind of
stuff. Now everything is
kept, all your files are
in your computer or they're on your
phone. And you may have
power for a certain amount
of time on those devices, but eventually
it's going to run out.
And if you don't have a
way to reenergize them or back them up,
you're not going to be
able to get that information.
So this is something that you want to
(10:31:12):
make sure that your hard
copies are in some type
of water sealed. Big Ziploc bags, always
good. You can,
especially the ones that have the
double seal on them, those usually hold
up pretty well. And
then just make sure that
you're keeping those in a safe place.
So as we're approaching hurricane season,
one of the things that
we're going to be doing,
as you just mentioned, is stockpiling
supplies for a certain
(10:31:34):
amount of time during and after
a storm so that members of your family
have proper food, have
proper water. What about
pets?
Yeah, same thing with pets. You want to
make sure that you, same
thing with them, right?
You want to make sure their medication is
up to date. They take
medication and you have
it to run through like a 90 day. And then
of course, food, make
sure you have plenty
of food leading into hurricane season. I
would say that if you
stockpile, you know, try to
(10:31:55):
stockpile at least a week. It used to be
three days. And then we
found is that a week's
better. So if you can, if you can do a
week of stockpiling, it
just really helps with
that transit because then you're not, you
know, when we have these pods, points of
distribution where we're handing out
water and ice and that
kind of, and maybe you get
a couple MREs for the week. Those get
(10:32:15):
overcrowded. They get
overcrowded. There's
people in line for maybe hours. And if
you have all that at
home already, it just makes
it so much easier. It's just less strain
on you and it's less
strain on the system.
Question. If say if I'm at home and
powers out going to be a
couple three days or more
before I get get the opportunity to get
regular electricity
(10:32:35):
back in the home, should I
should I be thinking about a camp stove
and how would I use it if I were?
Well, if you're going to use something
like that, anything
that's like a camp stove or
something that has propane or, you know,
something along that
lines, just make sure you
don't use it inside. That's number one.
And number two, make
sure when you use it, you
use it safely because you're talking
about something that
it's an open flame. It's
(10:32:56):
something that, you know, if it builds up
enough and it could be
a little bit tiny bit
explosive. Sure. And then on on the same
token with that, when we're talking about
that, the generator, make sure that your
generators outside of your house as well.
You don't want your generator in an
enclosed environment
because it builds up CO. And
that we've, you know, unfortunately,
(10:33:17):
we've had that problem
even in my career where I've
seen it where we've been in the houses
where people were
running the generators and and
passed away. So you just want to make
sure that you're not
doing that. Anything that has
an open flame can create can create like
CO or something that
disrupts the oxygen in your
in your environment. You don't want that
inside. You want to make
sure that's all outside.
(10:33:38):
And I would think that that apply to it
during the storm when
it's dark and it's windy
outside. People might want to light a
candle. You don't want to do that inside.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's fine to have
candles, candles,
candles, candles are fine. The
problem is, is that you want to make sure
that if you're going
to go to bed or you're
going to do something like that, you want
to make sure that
those candles are put out
(10:33:59):
completely before you lay down to go to
bed. You know, any
anything, smoking candles, any
other day that those are open flames, you
have to treat them,
you know, with respect.
OK, for folks who are new to the area or
folks who are really
not, you know, paying
close attention to the to classification
of storms, we have
different levels of severity
(10:34:20):
and strength. Let's go over a little bit
of that. And where is it
that we really start to
have to be totally on our
toes as far as getting prepared?
Well, you have to be totally on your on
your toes to be prepared for anything.
Right. So we you know, we just had
Hurricane Milton, which
actually hit several hundred
miles away from us. But the feeder bans
through tornadoes at
(10:34:40):
us, a record number of
tornadoes for the state of Florida, a
record number of
tornadoes for Palm Beach County.
We had more EF3 storm tornadoes than
we've had pretty much,
you know, in the last 50
years in one go. And so it it doesn't
matter what the storm
is, whether it's a tropical
storm all the way to a Cat
5, you need to be prepared.
(10:35:02):
However, a tropical storm is usually like
a very unorganized system.
It's not fully together yet. Sometimes
this can be some of the
worst because they'll sit, they
can sit on top of you for days and days.
I remember back to
Hurricane Francis and Hurricane
Francis wasn't a super strong storm. It
was a category two, not
super strong. When it hit
(10:35:22):
the coast, it downgraded to a category
one, but it sat on top of
us for 36 straight hours and
just doused us. And so that was, you
know, that was probably a
very dangerous storm, even
though it was only a category one when it
hit us. It was a very
dangerous storm because all of
the flooding that it caused. So category,
you know, historically,
category ones are basically
(10:35:44):
like a giant thunderstorm, lots of rain,
some wind. We see
thunderstorms in Florida in the
afternoons in the summer with sometimes
60 mile an hour winds. So
it's similar to that, but on
a bigger scale. A category two, now we're
starting to get into like
some, some more devastating
winds. You know, depending on which way
(10:36:04):
it comes in, storm surge, we
have to worry about. So the
stronger the storm and the way it comes
in, you could get higher and
higher storm surge. And then
a category three is what we call starting
to get into the major
category. Category four is a very,
very strong storm. It's basically a
category five minus a few miles per hour.
(10:36:25):
So they're very, very
devastating. And then a category five,
which is the most major
storm, we've seen a few of those
lately. And believe it or not, in the
last, since 2000, we've had
more category five storms make
landfall in the United States than we had
since 1850. So it's, you know, we're
starting to see these
rapid intensification of these storms. A
(10:36:45):
category five is, is a storm that if
you're anywhere near
an evacuation zone, or you're in an
evacuation zone, you really need to think
about, about leaving
evacuation zone, you absolutely need to
leave. If you're on the fringe of
evacuation zone, possibly.
But I would say don't take those storms
lightly. Because we have
(10:37:05):
seen people that have taken them
lightly and they've paid
for it with their lives.
Well, we're talking about evacuations.
How would I know if I'm
in an evacuation zone?
Yeah, so there's a couple different ways.
One of them is to go to our website,
WPB.org, front slash
hurricane. We have the evacuation zones
there. Palm Beach County
Department of Emergency
Management also has them. They have
booklets at your local
(10:37:26):
libraries with that information in
as well. And also, you can get them at
any of the county buildings, they have
those, and we have them
here in the city. Those, those booklets
are pretty, pretty good in regards to the
information they have
in them. They have what kit, how you're
going to build a kit, things that you
need to do pre-storm,
things you need to do pro-storm, which if
(10:37:47):
we're talking post-storm,
you don't need to do anything
but stay in your house. We'll get to that
in a minute. And then of
course, your evacuation
zones. And then we, and we base those
evacuation zones a lot of times on
modeling for storm surge.
Our major concern is flooding. The wind
is a, is a concern,
but flooding, you know,
water is very, very dangerous and it
(10:38:08):
weighs, you know, it's about eight and a
half pounds a gallon.
So when you're getting thousands of
gallons pushed of water,
push your thousands of pounds
of pressure against your structure, it
could, it could be
devastating and it could, it could
wash you away. It can, you know, it could
do a lot of damage. So if
you are in evacuation zone
and you're told to evacuate, you need to
evacuate. Now we saw the damage that
(10:38:29):
Hurricane Ian did to
the West coast as far as flooding was
concerned, some of the most stunning
video you've ever seen
of the water running through the city and
wiping things out. Is that
possible here? Yeah, of course,
when you're a coastal city, even if
you're on the inter coastal,
you're still a coastal city.
So what does that mean? Whenever we have
storm surge, we do have
(10:38:49):
barrier islands. So we have,
for us in the city, it's town of Palm
beach down south, it's further, it's
Manalapan and it got
Jupiter Island north. There's a barrier
islands. If there is, we
still have cutouts. So those
cutouts still bring in the storm surge.
So whenever you have a storm surge, and
we've seen it here in
the city, we've actually, Nicole,
Hurricane Nicole, which was
(10:39:10):
not a major storm, it was a,
it was a category one, but the way that
it came in, it actually
brought us about four and a half
feet of storm surge, which is right at
the top of our seawall. And
if you were in certain areas of
the city, I have my take my vehicle, my
response vehicle is a Chevy
Tahoe. It's a little bit jacked
up and there was areas that we couldn't
(10:39:32):
get through and that. So
we, you know, we have dealt
with some storm surge in the city,
especially, you know, if it gets above
the seawall, I mean,
if we have a, if we have a 10 foot storm
surge and a four and a half
foot was at the top of the
seawall, you're going to have another six
feet coming over the wall.
So that could flood all the
(10:39:52):
way. You know, luckily there's ridges in
the state of Florida. So you
have these, these main ridges
that during the ice to not bore you good.
So during the ice age, you
had a recession of water.
Every time the water receded a certain
amount, it would create a
ridge in the state of Florida,
where we happen to be sitting on a ridge
in the city. That ridge runs
basically just west of Dixie
(10:40:14):
Highway. So storm surge usually around
the olive, olive and east is
a little bit worse. Whereas if
you're, if you're west of olive, it's not
as bad depending on the
amount of storm surge. Sure. But
we do have, we do have the opportunity
here to have that. Now
we've been talking a lot about
water and storm surge right at the, at
the, at the water's edge.
(10:40:35):
What about folks who live
further west? Are there, do they have to
worry about it at all?
Yeah, we're not talking storm
surge at that point, but we are talking
flooding. Flooding. So
flooding could be a problem if,
if you're in a neighborhood that doesn't
have great drainage and a
lot of the older neighborhoods
do not, they don't have great, they don't
have great drainage
systems. I mean, we have a really
(10:40:55):
robust storm, storm system in the city of
West Palm Beach where we
have great drainage. However,
there are still a lot of low lying areas
in the city that we do
worry about. And so you just got
to be mindful of that. And if you are in
one of those zones, once
again, if you see on a, on either
one of the booklets that you can pick up
or on the website, if you
see you're in a zone and you're
(10:41:16):
told to evacuate, evacuate. Okay. And
that actually brings us to
the next part of our discussion.
This seems to me that you have, you have
a choice. Everybody has a choice. Do I
stay or do I go? And
so there, we've talked about some of the
factors that are involved
in making that decision.
Flooding, you know, the, the danger of
(10:41:37):
the home that you're in,
what other factors are really involved in
making a decision? So if
you're in a, in a zone and you're
told to evacuate, evacuate. However, if
you're not, it's a personal
preference. And I will tell
you that it's a, it's very dependent on
the person. But we have
seen in the past and I'll use,
(10:41:58):
oh gosh, let me think about which
hurricane this was. We've had
a few. Just a few hurricanes.
Yeah. We, I'm trying to remember which
hurricane it was, but it
was basically making a direct
beeline for us and then wrapped around
the, you know, under, south of us and
came right up on the
west coast. So we had a lot of people
that evacuated from us
to the west coast. And I
(10:42:19):
want to say it was Irma. I think you're
right. But I'm, yeah, I
think it was Irma. So where
they evacuated to the west coast and it
hit harder on the west coast
than it did on the east coast,
even though we still got category two
winds and it was, you know,
we still had, we caught a tree
maguette and we still had, you know, we
still had a lot of issues here in the
city with that storm,
but it wrapped on with the west coast and
(10:42:40):
then took a straight
track right through Atlanta,
almost similar to what happened in North
Carolina. You know, we saw that happen
with, with, with Irma,
where it went across the state and
straight up through Georgia and the
Carolinas. So the problem
was, is those people that evacuated to
the west coast and into
Georgia almost got it worse than
what we got. So it's like I said, it's a
personal preference. You
(10:43:02):
know, we're not going to tell you
if you're not in an evacuation zone,
we're not going to tell you
whether you need to or not.
However, if you are going to do it early,
don't wait. Because one of
the things that we see is
the people that wait around and then do
it late is they get trapped on the
interstate. There is no gas
because everybody's buying gas. And then
you're, now you're running into other
(10:43:23):
issues. So if you're
going to, you know, if you're going to do
it, you know, do it early.
If you decide to stay and you
say, okay, I'm not going to try to get on
I-95. I'm not trying to
move out, move upstate or out
over to the west coast. I'm going to stay
here in the county.
Let's talk a little bit about
shelters. What's the process of getting
(10:43:46):
into a shelter? Do I just
walk in or what happens?
So most shelters that are open, that are
not special needs or pet
friendly, yeah, you can
just go to, you don't have to, you don't
have to register for them,
you can just kind of show up.
And depending on the amount of evacuation
zones that we start to
empty out and what we think the
storm surge is going to be, and there's a
lot of factors to go into
(10:44:06):
it. Depends on how many, how
many shelters open. Most of the time we
open anywhere between
nine and 12 shelters. Some of
those are special needs and pet friendly.
So if you are a special
needs person that needs, like you
have a, you have an oxygen machine you
have to carry with you, or
you have, you have to have, do
(10:44:26):
dialysis and you need a power source. You
need to go ahead and
register now with the county, with
Palm Beach County Department of Emergency
Management. If you go to
their site and you put in
special needs shelter, you'll find that
there is a registration form. You can
fill out that registration
form and that does help a lot with the
process. And that's an
important point that the shelters
are run by the county. They're not a city
(10:44:48):
operation. Correct.
Don't call the city on that.
Call the county. So none of the
municipalities, there's 39
municipalities in this county.
None of them operate shelters. Okay. The
county operates shelters.
That is actually a state
statute that the counties operate,
operate those. And then the same thing
with evacuation zones.
The county's, the county actually is the
(10:45:11):
one that determines when
we're going to evacuate and who's
going to evacuate. When I go to a
shelter, do I bring food and
water? Do I bring bedding? What
sort of thing? So when you go to a
shelter, you literally only get a very
small, about a 60, not
even 60 square feet of area for you. You
can basically get a cot
and a small area around that
(10:45:31):
cot for your stuff. So you shouldn't
bring a lot. You shouldn't bring a lot
with you. Try to, you
know, you'll, mostly the food and water
will be provided at the
shelter unless, unless determined
otherwise by the county. So you should be
covered with that. But if
you wanted to bring your own,
you know, pillow and stuff like that, I
would absolutely bring it.
(10:45:52):
I would not bring a lot of
personal items. A lot of people like to
grab as much as they can
and bring it with them. The
problem is there's just not a lot of
space for it. And there's a
good chance that they're going
to tell you to leave it in your car. Or
you're going to have to
take it back because they're
not going to have space for it. It's a
very limited, when we're
talking about shelters,
it's mostly schools or other government
type buildings, but
definitely schools. And the gym
(10:46:14):
is basically the big sleeping areas or,
and then they may put people in the
hallways, but that's
it. I mean, there's not a lot of area for
you to go. So just be
sparse on what you bring.
And there's only very specific shelters
or a shelter that will accept pets.
Yeah. So the same thing with very similar
to a special needs
shelter. You have to make sure
you register for a pet friendly shelter.
(10:46:35):
Okay. All right. So we've
talked a lot about, about
getting ready, what we, what we need to
have, what should, should
we be doing prior to a storm,
when we should be doing it? Let's talk
just a little bit
about, okay, there is a storm
underway. I'm in my home. I'm in a place
where it has not been
evacuated. We have been asked to
leave. What are the things I shouldn't be
(10:46:56):
doing? Should I open door and look
outside? What's going
on? So if it was 1985, I would say have a
hurricane party. That's
what everybody used to do.
You know, but you know that and I, and
I'm just, but basically,
you know, the biggest thing
during the storm is you want to stay in
the, in the house. You want
to have a, you want to make
(10:47:17):
sure that you have a plan. So that plan
includes, do I have a safe
area in my house that I can go
to if I have to somewhere there's no
windows and interior room. If it's a
bathroom, even better.
Cause then you can have, you can have the
tub. If you have a tub, you
know, I know a lot of houses
now don't have tubs like the old days,
but a tub is always a really good place
to go because they're
(10:47:37):
made out of some type of metal or cast
iron. And you know, if you have a
collapse, they usually are
pretty solid structures. And then, you
know, make sure you have a plan, make
sure you have a plan
with your family. If we have to leave
this house, what is our safe
area? Where are we going to go?
If we get split up, where are we going to
meet? And then are we going
to go to a neighbor's house?
Are we going to go to the car? All of
(10:47:57):
these things are factors. So you got to
make sure that you have
that plan. I actually go over with my son
pretty regularly. Like,
Hey, if we had a fire in the
house or we had something, how are you
getting out? And you know, he, he tells
me how. So, and I say,
okay, where are we meeting? I'm meeting
at the park across the
street. So there's all of these
factors that you want to make sure that
you have, especially with
your family, because you want to
make sure that your family's safe and
(10:48:19):
they know what's going on.
The biggest thing is if you're
going to stay, stay behind, once the
storm is cleared, stay at
your house. If you have to make
some repairs to your house, that's fine.
Go outside. But you got
to also remember there's,
there's a lot of things going on post
storm. Is there power lines
down? Is there tree branches
hanging on by a thread that could fall at
any time? Is, is there
(10:48:40):
flooding outside of your house
and that you're going to get caught up
in? Is there, you know, in
Florida, we are in Florida,
is there, if there is flooding, is there
going to be snakes and is
there going to be gators and is
there going to be any number of things if
you're on the West coast,
apparently, and I don't know how
true it is, there's sharks and on the
street. So, you know, so, you
know, make sure that you don't
(10:49:00):
go out. And then the other part of this
is you may be impeding the first
responders. If you're out,
you know, a lot of people like to be
lucky, lose and get in their
car and try to drive around.
This is a double whammy. So number one,
you might get in trouble and
then we got to come get you.
Number two, you're in the way. So if
we're trying, you know, our first 72
hours is really about life
safety. It's about going out and trying
to rescue people and responding to the
(10:49:21):
calls that have been
queued up for the last however many
hours, depending on the storm. And we
have to get through. We have
cut teams that go out and they're cutting
trees and throwing them out of the
roadway. And if you're
out there, you're in the way. If you're
blocking one of the trees,
and you can't get out, then we
can't cut the tree and it just impedes
it, it leads right away for our first
responders to get through.
So just stay home, stay home for the
(10:49:42):
first couple days. There'll be
plenty of pictures, you know,
we take pictures and we post them and
that kind of stuff. There'll
be plenty of that stuff that
you can see. Stay close to your house,
don't try to get too far
away, because then you can become
a victim as well. Sure. One of the things
that I wanted to touch on
was the need for information
and getting communication out properly.
(10:50:02):
Now we live in a world
where, you know, you're going to
call up Instagram and you're going to see
a map of where the storm is
heading. Who knows who put
it there? Right. Who knows if it's
correct? What advice do we have for folks
so that they get the
right information for area for the folks
who live in West Palm Beach? Local
officials, local officials,
local news. We feed the news constantly.
(10:50:24):
We are constantly giving
them information so that they
can put information out. Same thing with
our social media, the
city social media, you know,
the city hotline, which is the 822-222
number. These are all ways
to get the information. Do not
listen to people who are not experts at
this. Do not listen to
people that are talking heads and
just want to get clicks for you. You
(10:50:46):
know, I see it a lot. I see it even on
YouTube and I see it on
some of these other Facebook and things
like that. I see these
people that want to get clicks
and they'll say, major hurricane, major
this, or storm systems
already. And they're, it's funny
because they're not even, number one,
they're not experts. And number two,
(10:51:07):
they're not even local
people. They're people from, they may be
sitting in their house in
New Jersey just trying to get
clicks. So it's more about just listening
to local, local officials,
making sure that you have the
right things in place. So, so make sure
you're watching whatever
news channel you watch,
make sure that you're following the city
or the city fire
department or city police department
(10:51:28):
on Instagram or Facebook or whatever
social media you're on and, and stay off
of the people who are
not in any of those capacities because
you're going to be getting false
information. And when
you say local news channels, it's, I
think it's also important to
point out, you know, listen to
West Palm beach, local news, nothing
against the folks in Miami,
but there's a big difference
(10:51:49):
between hitting a storm hitting in Miami
and hitting a West Palm
beach. Yeah. There's, so,
you know, anytime you're talking about a
70 mile difference, that
could be a huge difference in a
storm. So, you know, you could get, and
I'll bring up Milton once
again, Milton hit the West coast,
it hit 150 miles away from us, but yet we
(10:52:10):
had the worst damage of
anybody because between
the Tri County area, Palm beach, Martin
and St. Lucie, the tornadoes
that came off of that storm
were insane. They're just some of the
most, I've lived here in my
entire life since 1970. Well,
not my entire life, but since 1977 and
it's the worst, that's the worst
tornadoes I've ever seen
(10:52:31):
in Florida. So every, every hurricane
season is unique. There are
all kinds of forecasts going
back and forth. Here we are this year.
What is the general
advice you'd want to give folks
for this hurricane season? Just be
prepared. The biggest thing is be
prepared and just don't listen
to all the talking heads about things.
(10:52:52):
You know, listen to the
national weather service,
listen to the Colorado state university.
Those are the people that
are putting these forecasts
together. And honestly, it's a forecast
and it only takes one storm.
You know, Andrew is a perfect
example. We were in a down year with
Andrew. It was a late August.
We hadn't even had a storm in
the, in the basin yet. And out of
(10:53:14):
nowhere, here comes Andrew
and Andrew was devastating. And,
it was, it was the only devastating, it
was the only storm that
season that was really a bad storm.
So it only takes one, whether it's we're
going to get 15 storms this year or
whether we're going to
get 30 storms this year, it doesn't
really matter because it takes that one
storm that comes across
(10:53:34):
and just devastates everything. So the
biggest thing is just be
prepared, build your kit,
have a plan and make sure
you know your evacuation zones.
Brent Bloomfield, thank you so much for
what you do. We
appreciate you being here.
Awesome. Thank you.
And thank you for joining us. This has
been the City Center
podcast from West Palm Beach.
This is a product of the City of West
(10:53:55):
Palm Beach Communications Department.
We'll see you next time.
I'm Jerry Marcello. Welcome to the City
Center podcast from West
Palm Beach, Florida. Hurricane
season is here. What do you need to do to
prepare? How can you stay safe and how do
you protect your family? We'll talk about
it next on the City
Center podcast from West
Palm Beach. And joining me today is Brent
(10:28:04):
Bloomfield, assistant fire
chief for the City of West
Palm Beach. Brent,
thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having me. We talked about
this before many,
many times, but it always
bears repeating. Preparation is the key
to surviving a storm.
What does that entail?
What does it do? What should people here
locally be thinking
about? I think the number one
thing is knowing the hurricane season. It
(10:28:25):
starts on June 1st. It
runs through November
30th. And what we've seen is in the last
few years, we've seen
these hurricane seasons
just get more and more devastating. We're
starting to see a change
in how these hurricanes
are ramping up, rapid intensification. So
with that being said,
you want to make sure
that you're prepared for the worst case
scenario. What is worst
case scenario? Well, worst case
scenario is we have a cat fight like
(10:28:47):
Dorian bearing down on
us, but it doesn't make that
turn. It comes right across us, like a
hurricane, Andrew, or on the
West Coast, we've seen Michael
and we've seen Ian and we see, I mean, a
ton of different
storms. So the preparation is
very simple. Make sure that your house is
in order. Number one, inside and outside,
make sure that the trees are trimmed,
make sure that
(10:29:07):
everything that can be picked up
is picked up. Then things that are easily
moved, make sure you
have somewhere to take
them whenever a storm comes inside the
house. Make sure that
you have plenty of food and
water for the event. Start that now, not
two days before the
storm. You get perishable
food items that you'll eat later, water
that you're going to
drink later. You can always
drink it later. You can always eat
perishable food later. You
(10:29:29):
know, things like peanut butter,
and jelly, things like canned foods,
canned meat, like tuna,
those are always good things.
Make sure that your medication is up to
date and you can run it
through for, if you have
to get a 90 day supply, get a 90 day
supply if that can run
you through. Make sure if
we have a storm that's going to be coming
that you don't wait
till the day before to
(10:29:49):
fill those prescriptions. Make sure you
get them done early. Make
sure that all your paperwork
is in order, especially your insurance
paperwork. Make sure that's in a
watertight bag, easy
to get to, because once the storm clears,
you know, and you
start to, you know, we're
out of the phase of the 72 hours where
we're in a phase of we're
responding, we're trying
to save people, then the recovery starts,
(10:30:11):
right? So the recovery
part for you as a citizen
is you want to make sure that you get a
hold of your insurance
company if you have any
damage and you want to make sure that
your paperwork's in
order. So it's an easy, easy
transition for you.
I think a lot of people make the mistake
or they get the mental
idea that, "Oh, I'll just
call it up on my phone or I'll be on my
PC." We might not have power
for a long time afterwards.
(10:30:31):
Well, we may not have power or signal. So
that was one of the
things that we ran into
in Hurricane Michael when we were in the
Panhandle. We had a 20
mile area that was, there was
no signal at all. When you have no
signal, that means you have no
communication. So you
think that you're going to just be able
to pull these things
up on your phone because
that's what we're used to, right? You
know, 20 years ago,
everything was hard paper. You
(10:30:52):
had everything in folders, that kind of
stuff. Now everything is
kept, all your files are
in your computer or they're on your
phone. And you may have
power for a certain amount
of time on those devices, but eventually
it's going to run out.
And if you don't have a
way to reenergize them or back them up,
you're not going to be
able to get that information.
So this is something that you want to
(10:31:12):
make sure that your hard
copies are in some type
of water sealed. Big Ziploc bags, always
good. You can,
especially the ones that have the
double seal on them, those usually hold
up pretty well. And
then just make sure that
you're keeping those in a safe place.
So as we're approaching hurricane season,
one of the things that
we're going to be doing,
as you just mentioned, is stockpiling
supplies for a certain
(10:31:34):
amount of time during and after
a storm so that members of your family
have proper food, have
proper water. What about
pets?
Yeah, same thing with pets. You want to
make sure that you, same
thing with them, right?
You want to make sure their medication is
up to date. They take
medication and you have
it to run through like a 90 day. And then
of course, food, make
sure you have plenty
of food leading into hurricane season. I
would say that if you
stockpile, you know, try to
(10:31:55):
stockpile at least a week. It used to be
three days. And then we
found is that a week's
better. So if you can, if you can do a
week of stockpiling, it
just really helps with
that transit because then you're not, you
know, when we have these pods, points of
distribution where we're handing out
water and ice and that
kind of, and maybe you get
a couple MREs for the week. Those get
(10:32:15):
overcrowded. They get
overcrowded. There's
people in line for maybe hours. And if
you have all that at
home already, it just makes
it so much easier. It's just less strain
on you and it's less
strain on the system.
Question. If say if I'm at home and
powers out going to be a
couple three days or more
before I get get the opportunity to get
regular electricity
(10:32:35):
back in the home, should I
should I be thinking about a camp stove
and how would I use it if I were?
Well, if you're going to use something
like that, anything
that's like a camp stove or
something that has propane or, you know,
something along that
lines, just make sure you
don't use it inside. That's number one.
And number two, make
sure when you use it, you
use it safely because you're talking
about something that
it's an open flame. It's
(10:32:56):
something that, you know, if it builds up
enough and it could be
a little bit tiny bit
explosive. Sure. And then on on the same
token with that, when we're talking about
that, the generator, make sure that your
generators outside of your house as well.
You don't want your generator in an
enclosed environment
because it builds up CO. And
that we've, you know, unfortunately,
(10:33:17):
we've had that problem
even in my career where I've
seen it where we've been in the houses
where people were
running the generators and and
passed away. So you just want to make
sure that you're not
doing that. Anything that has
an open flame can create can create like
CO or something that
disrupts the oxygen in your
in your environment. You don't want that
inside. You want to make
sure that's all outside.
(10:33:38):
And I would think that that apply to it
during the storm when
it's dark and it's windy
outside. People might want to light a
candle. You don't want to do that inside.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's fine to have
candles, candles,
candles, candles are fine. The
problem is, is that you want to make sure
that if you're going
to go to bed or you're
going to do something like that, you want
to make sure that
those candles are put out
(10:33:59):
completely before you lay down to go to
bed. You know, any
anything, smoking candles, any
other day that those are open flames, you
have to treat them,
you know, with respect.
OK, for folks who are new to the area or
folks who are really
not, you know, paying
close attention to the to classification
of storms, we have
different levels of severity
(10:34:20):
and strength. Let's go over a little bit
of that. And where is it
that we really start to
have to be totally on our
toes as far as getting prepared?
Well, you have to be totally on your on
your toes to be prepared for anything.
Right. So we you know, we just had
Hurricane Milton, which
actually hit several hundred
miles away from us. But the feeder bans
through tornadoes at
(10:34:40):
us, a record number of
tornadoes for the state of Florida, a
record number of
tornadoes for Palm Beach County.
We had more EF3 storm tornadoes than
we've had pretty much,
you know, in the last 50
years in one go. And so it it doesn't
matter what the storm
is, whether it's a tropical
storm all the way to a Cat
5, you need to be prepared.
(10:35:02):
However, a tropical storm is usually like
a very unorganized system.
It's not fully together yet. Sometimes
this can be some of the
worst because they'll sit, they
can sit on top of you for days and days.
I remember back to
Hurricane Francis and Hurricane
Francis wasn't a super strong storm. It
was a category two, not
super strong. When it hit
(10:35:22):
the coast, it downgraded to a category
one, but it sat on top of
us for 36 straight hours and
just doused us. And so that was, you
know, that was probably a
very dangerous storm, even
though it was only a category one when it
hit us. It was a very
dangerous storm because all of
the flooding that it caused. So category,
you know, historically,
category ones are basically
(10:35:44):
like a giant thunderstorm, lots of rain,
some wind. We see
thunderstorms in Florida in the
afternoons in the summer with sometimes
60 mile an hour winds. So
it's similar to that, but on
a bigger scale. A category two, now we're
starting to get into like
some, some more devastating
winds. You know, depending on which way
(10:36:04):
it comes in, storm surge, we
have to worry about. So the
stronger the storm and the way it comes
in, you could get higher and
higher storm surge. And then
a category three is what we call starting
to get into the major
category. Category four is a very,
very strong storm. It's basically a
category five minus a few miles per hour.
(10:36:25):
So they're very, very
devastating. And then a category five,
which is the most major
storm, we've seen a few of those
lately. And believe it or not, in the
last, since 2000, we've had
more category five storms make
landfall in the United States than we had
since 1850. So it's, you know, we're
starting to see these
rapid intensification of these storms. A
(10:36:45):
category five is, is a storm that if
you're anywhere near
an evacuation zone, or you're in an
evacuation zone, you really need to think
about, about leaving
evacuation zone, you absolutely need to
leave. If you're on the fringe of
evacuation zone, possibly.
But I would say don't take those storms
lightly. Because we have
(10:37:05):
seen people that have taken them
lightly and they've paid
for it with their lives.
Well, we're talking about evacuations.
How would I know if I'm
in an evacuation zone?
Yeah, so there's a couple different ways.
One of them is to go to our website,
WPB.org, front slash
hurricane. We have the evacuation zones
there. Palm Beach County
Department of Emergency
Management also has them. They have
booklets at your local
(10:37:26):
libraries with that information in
as well. And also, you can get them at
any of the county buildings, they have
those, and we have them
here in the city. Those, those booklets
are pretty, pretty good in regards to the
information they have
in them. They have what kit, how you're
going to build a kit, things that you
need to do pre-storm,
things you need to do pro-storm, which if
(10:37:47):
we're talking post-storm,
you don't need to do anything
but stay in your house. We'll get to that
in a minute. And then of
course, your evacuation
zones. And then we, and we base those
evacuation zones a lot of times on
modeling for storm surge.
Our major concern is flooding. The wind
is a, is a concern,
but flooding, you know,
water is very, very dangerous and it
(10:38:08):
weighs, you know, it's about eight and a
half pounds a gallon.
So when you're getting thousands of
gallons pushed of water,
push your thousands of pounds
of pressure against your structure, it
could, it could be
devastating and it could, it could
wash you away. It can, you know, it could
do a lot of damage. So if
you are in evacuation zone
and you're told to evacuate, you need to
evacuate. Now we saw the damage that
(10:38:29):
Hurricane Ian did to
the West coast as far as flooding was
concerned, some of the most stunning
video you've ever seen
of the water running through the city and
wiping things out. Is that
possible here? Yeah, of course,
when you're a coastal city, even if
you're on the inter coastal,
you're still a coastal city.
So what does that mean? Whenever we have
storm surge, we do have
(10:38:49):
barrier islands. So we have,
for us in the city, it's town of Palm
beach down south, it's further, it's
Manalapan and it got
Jupiter Island north. There's a barrier
islands. If there is, we
still have cutouts. So those
cutouts still bring in the storm surge.
So whenever you have a storm surge, and
we've seen it here in
the city, we've actually, Nicole,
Hurricane Nicole, which was
(10:39:10):
not a major storm, it was a,
it was a category one, but the way that
it came in, it actually
brought us about four and a half
feet of storm surge, which is right at
the top of our seawall. And
if you were in certain areas of
the city, I have my take my vehicle, my
response vehicle is a Chevy
Tahoe. It's a little bit jacked
up and there was areas that we couldn't
(10:39:32):
get through and that. So
we, you know, we have dealt
with some storm surge in the city,
especially, you know, if it gets above
the seawall, I mean,
if we have a, if we have a 10 foot storm
surge and a four and a half
foot was at the top of the
seawall, you're going to have another six
feet coming over the wall.
So that could flood all the
(10:39:52):
way. You know, luckily there's ridges in
the state of Florida. So you
have these, these main ridges
that during the ice to not bore you good.
So during the ice age, you
had a recession of water.
Every time the water receded a certain
amount, it would create a
ridge in the state of Florida,
where we happen to be sitting on a ridge
in the city. That ridge runs
basically just west of Dixie
(10:40:14):
Highway. So storm surge usually around
the olive, olive and east is
a little bit worse. Whereas if
you're, if you're west of olive, it's not
as bad depending on the
amount of storm surge. Sure. But
we do have, we do have the opportunity
here to have that. Now
we've been talking a lot about
water and storm surge right at the, at
the, at the water's edge.
(10:40:35):
What about folks who live
further west? Are there, do they have to
worry about it at all?
Yeah, we're not talking storm
surge at that point, but we are talking
flooding. Flooding. So
flooding could be a problem if,
if you're in a neighborhood that doesn't
have great drainage and a
lot of the older neighborhoods
do not, they don't have great, they don't
have great drainage
systems. I mean, we have a really
(10:40:55):
robust storm, storm system in the city of
West Palm Beach where we
have great drainage. However,
there are still a lot of low lying areas
in the city that we do
worry about. And so you just got
to be mindful of that. And if you are in
one of those zones, once
again, if you see on a, on either
one of the booklets that you can pick up
or on the website, if you
see you're in a zone and you're
(10:41:16):
told to evacuate, evacuate. Okay. And
that actually brings us to
the next part of our discussion.
This seems to me that you have, you have
a choice. Everybody has a choice. Do I
stay or do I go? And
so there, we've talked about some of the
factors that are involved
in making that decision.
Flooding, you know, the, the danger of
(10:41:37):
the home that you're in,
what other factors are really involved in
making a decision? So if
you're in a, in a zone and you're
told to evacuate, evacuate. However, if
you're not, it's a personal
preference. And I will tell
you that it's a, it's very dependent on
the person. But we have
seen in the past and I'll use,
(10:41:58):
oh gosh, let me think about which
hurricane this was. We've had
a few. Just a few hurricanes.
Yeah. We, I'm trying to remember which
hurricane it was, but it
was basically making a direct
beeline for us and then wrapped around
the, you know, under, south of us and
came right up on the
west coast. So we had a lot of people
that evacuated from us
to the west coast. And I
(10:42:19):
want to say it was Irma. I think you're
right. But I'm, yeah, I
think it was Irma. So where
they evacuated to the west coast and it
hit harder on the west coast
than it did on the east coast,
even though we still got category two
winds and it was, you know,
we still had, we caught a tree
maguette and we still had, you know, we
still had a lot of issues here in the
city with that storm,
but it wrapped on with the west coast and
(10:42:40):
then took a straight
track right through Atlanta,
almost similar to what happened in North
Carolina. You know, we saw that happen
with, with, with Irma,
where it went across the state and
straight up through Georgia and the
Carolinas. So the problem
was, is those people that evacuated to
the west coast and into
Georgia almost got it worse than
what we got. So it's like I said, it's a
personal preference. You
(10:43:02):
know, we're not going to tell you
if you're not in an evacuation zone,
we're not going to tell you
whether you need to or not.
However, if you are going to do it early,
don't wait. Because one of
the things that we see is
the people that wait around and then do
it late is they get trapped on the
interstate. There is no gas
because everybody's buying gas. And then
you're, now you're running into other
(10:43:23):
issues. So if you're
going to, you know, if you're going to do
it, you know, do it early.
If you decide to stay and you
say, okay, I'm not going to try to get on
I-95. I'm not trying to
move out, move upstate or out
over to the west coast. I'm going to stay
here in the county.
Let's talk a little bit about
shelters. What's the process of getting
(10:43:46):
into a shelter? Do I just
walk in or what happens?
So most shelters that are open, that are
not special needs or pet
friendly, yeah, you can
just go to, you don't have to, you don't
have to register for them,
you can just kind of show up.
And depending on the amount of evacuation
zones that we start to
empty out and what we think the
storm surge is going to be, and there's a
lot of factors to go into
(10:44:06):
it. Depends on how many, how
many shelters open. Most of the time we
open anywhere between
nine and 12 shelters. Some of
those are special needs and pet friendly.
So if you are a special
needs person that needs, like you
have a, you have an oxygen machine you
have to carry with you, or
you have, you have to have, do
(10:44:26):
dialysis and you need a power source. You
need to go ahead and
register now with the county, with
Palm Beach County Department of Emergency
Management. If you go to
their site and you put in
special needs shelter, you'll find that
there is a registration form. You can
fill out that registration
form and that does help a lot with the
process. And that's an
important point that the shelters
are run by the county. They're not a city
(10:44:48):
operation. Correct.
Don't call the city on that.
Call the county. So none of the
municipalities, there's 39
municipalities in this county.
None of them operate shelters. Okay. The
county operates shelters.
That is actually a state
statute that the counties operate,
operate those. And then the same thing
with evacuation zones.
The county's, the county actually is the
(10:45:11):
one that determines when
we're going to evacuate and who's
going to evacuate. When I go to a
shelter, do I bring food and
water? Do I bring bedding? What
sort of thing? So when you go to a
shelter, you literally only get a very
small, about a 60, not
even 60 square feet of area for you. You
can basically get a cot
and a small area around that
(10:45:31):
cot for your stuff. So you shouldn't
bring a lot. You shouldn't bring a lot
with you. Try to, you
know, you'll, mostly the food and water
will be provided at the
shelter unless, unless determined
otherwise by the county. So you should be
covered with that. But if
you wanted to bring your own,
you know, pillow and stuff like that, I
would absolutely bring it.
(10:45:52):
I would not bring a lot of
personal items. A lot of people like to
grab as much as they can
and bring it with them. The
problem is there's just not a lot of
space for it. And there's a
good chance that they're going
to tell you to leave it in your car. Or
you're going to have to
take it back because they're
not going to have space for it. It's a
very limited, when we're
talking about shelters,
it's mostly schools or other government
type buildings, but
definitely schools. And the gym
(10:46:14):
is basically the big sleeping areas or,
and then they may put people in the
hallways, but that's
it. I mean, there's not a lot of area for
you to go. So just be
sparse on what you bring.
And there's only very specific shelters
or a shelter that will accept pets.
Yeah. So the same thing with very similar
to a special needs
shelter. You have to make sure
you register for a pet friendly shelter.
(10:46:35):
Okay. All right. So we've
talked a lot about, about
getting ready, what we, what we need to
have, what should, should
we be doing prior to a storm,
when we should be doing it? Let's talk
just a little bit
about, okay, there is a storm
underway. I'm in my home. I'm in a place
where it has not been
evacuated. We have been asked to
leave. What are the things I shouldn't be
(10:46:56):
doing? Should I open door and look
outside? What's going
on? So if it was 1985, I would say have a
hurricane party. That's
what everybody used to do.
You know, but you know that and I, and
I'm just, but basically,
you know, the biggest thing
during the storm is you want to stay in
the, in the house. You want
to have a, you want to make
(10:47:17):
sure that you have a plan. So that plan
includes, do I have a safe
area in my house that I can go
to if I have to somewhere there's no
windows and interior room. If it's a
bathroom, even better.
Cause then you can have, you can have the
tub. If you have a tub, you
know, I know a lot of houses
now don't have tubs like the old days,
but a tub is always a really good place
to go because they're
(10:47:37):
made out of some type of metal or cast
iron. And you know, if you have a
collapse, they usually are
pretty solid structures. And then, you
know, make sure you have a plan, make
sure you have a plan
with your family. If we have to leave
this house, what is our safe
area? Where are we going to go?
If we get split up, where are we going to
meet? And then are we going
to go to a neighbor's house?
Are we going to go to the car? All of
(10:47:57):
these things are factors. So you got to
make sure that you have
that plan. I actually go over with my son
pretty regularly. Like,
Hey, if we had a fire in the
house or we had something, how are you
getting out? And you know, he, he tells
me how. So, and I say,
okay, where are we meeting? I'm meeting
at the park across the
street. So there's all of these
factors that you want to make sure that
you have, especially with
your family, because you want to
make sure that your family's safe and
(10:48:19):
they know what's going on.
The biggest thing is if you're
going to stay, stay behind, once the
storm is cleared, stay at
your house. If you have to make
some repairs to your house, that's fine.
Go outside. But you got
to also remember there's,
there's a lot of things going on post
storm. Is there power lines
down? Is there tree branches
hanging on by a thread that could fall at
any time? Is, is there
(10:48:40):
flooding outside of your house
and that you're going to get caught up
in? Is there, you know, in
Florida, we are in Florida,
is there, if there is flooding, is there
going to be snakes and is
there going to be gators and is
there going to be any number of things if
you're on the West coast,
apparently, and I don't know how
true it is, there's sharks and on the
street. So, you know, so, you
know, make sure that you don't
(10:49:00):
go out. And then the other part of this
is you may be impeding the first
responders. If you're out,
you know, a lot of people like to be
lucky, lose and get in their
car and try to drive around.
This is a double whammy. So number one,
you might get in trouble and
then we got to come get you.
Number two, you're in the way. So if
we're trying, you know, our first 72
hours is really about life
safety. It's about going out and trying
to rescue people and responding to the
(10:49:21):
calls that have been
queued up for the last however many
hours, depending on the storm. And we
have to get through. We have
cut teams that go out and they're cutting
trees and throwing them out of the
roadway. And if you're
out there, you're in the way. If you're
blocking one of the trees,
and you can't get out, then we
can't cut the tree and it just impedes
it, it leads right away for our first
responders to get through.
So just stay home, stay home for the
(10:49:42):
first couple days. There'll be
plenty of pictures, you know,
we take pictures and we post them and
that kind of stuff. There'll
be plenty of that stuff that
you can see. Stay close to your house,
don't try to get too far
away, because then you can become
a victim as well. Sure. One of the things
that I wanted to touch on
was the need for information
and getting communication out properly.
(10:50:02):
Now we live in a world
where, you know, you're going to
call up Instagram and you're going to see
a map of where the storm is
heading. Who knows who put
it there? Right. Who knows if it's
correct? What advice do we have for folks
so that they get the
right information for area for the folks
who live in West Palm Beach? Local
officials, local officials,
local news. We feed the news constantly.
(10:50:24):
We are constantly giving
them information so that they
can put information out. Same thing with
our social media, the
city social media, you know,
the city hotline, which is the 822-222
number. These are all ways
to get the information. Do not
listen to people who are not experts at
this. Do not listen to
people that are talking heads and
just want to get clicks for you. You
(10:50:46):
know, I see it a lot. I see it even on
YouTube and I see it on
some of these other Facebook and things
like that. I see these
people that want to get clicks
and they'll say, major hurricane, major
this, or storm systems
already. And they're, it's funny
because they're not even, number one,
they're not experts. And number two,
(10:51:07):
they're not even local
people. They're people from, they may be
sitting in their house in
New Jersey just trying to get
clicks. So it's more about just listening
to local, local officials,
making sure that you have the
right things in place. So, so make sure
you're watching whatever
news channel you watch,
make sure that you're following the city
or the city fire
department or city police department
(10:51:28):
on Instagram or Facebook or whatever
social media you're on and, and stay off
of the people who are
not in any of those capacities because
you're going to be getting false
information. And when
you say local news channels, it's, I
think it's also important to
point out, you know, listen to
West Palm beach, local news, nothing
against the folks in Miami,
but there's a big difference
(10:51:49):
between hitting a storm hitting in Miami
and hitting a West Palm
beach. Yeah. There's, so,
you know, anytime you're talking about a
70 mile difference, that
could be a huge difference in a
storm. So, you know, you could get, and
I'll bring up Milton once
again, Milton hit the West coast,
it hit 150 miles away from us, but yet we
(10:52:10):
had the worst damage of
anybody because between
the Tri County area, Palm beach, Martin
and St. Lucie, the tornadoes
that came off of that storm
were insane. They're just some of the
most, I've lived here in my
entire life since 1970. Well,
not my entire life, but since 1977 and
it's the worst, that's the worst
tornadoes I've ever seen
(10:52:31):
in Florida. So every, every hurricane
season is unique. There are
all kinds of forecasts going
back and forth. Here we are this year.
What is the general
advice you'd want to give folks
for this hurricane season? Just be
prepared. The biggest thing is be
prepared and just don't listen
to all the talking heads about things.
(10:52:52):
You know, listen to the
national weather service,
listen to the Colorado state university.
Those are the people that
are putting these forecasts
together. And honestly, it's a forecast
and it only takes one storm.
You know, Andrew is a perfect
example. We were in a down year with
Andrew. It was a late August.
We hadn't even had a storm in
the, in the basin yet. And out of
(10:53:14):
nowhere, here comes Andrew
and Andrew was devastating. And,
it was, it was the only devastating, it
was the only storm that
season that was really a bad storm.
So it only takes one, whether it's we're
going to get 15 storms this year or
whether we're going to
get 30 storms this year, it doesn't
really matter because it takes that one
storm that comes across
(10:53:34):
and just devastates everything. So the
biggest thing is just be
prepared, build your kit,
have a plan and make sure
you know your evacuation zones.
Brent Bloomfield, thank you so much for
what you do. We
appreciate you being here.
Awesome. Thank you.
And thank you for joining us. This has
been the City Center
podcast from West Palm Beach.
This is a product of the City of West
(10:53:55):
Palm Beach Communications Department.
We'll see you next time.
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