Incident managers assist with storm recovery

Clay County Emergency Management Director John Ward said 29 Northeast Florida Incident Management Team members traveled to Tallahassee and Southwest Florida to assist local governments with hurricane recovery.

Ward told WOKV’s Jeana Gondek that the group sent one team

to Tallahassee to help state managers coordinate recovery efforts. One team traveled to the Port of Fort Myers to assist with a barge mission before the Sanibel Causeway was opened to emergency traffic. Another small group was dispatched to Boca Grande to help the local government, and a larger team to support the City of Cape Coral traveled to the municipality north of the Caloosahatchee River.

“And that’s not counting the many law enforcement and fire crews from Northeast Florida that are still down there,” Ward said.

The emergency manager added that most public safety crews were activated a week before the storm hit, “so we’re talking three-plus weeks now that many of our partners have been engaged in this.”

Ward said the biggest challenge for emergency managers in Southwest Florida is to right size local government.

“They’ll be doing debris for months,” he said. ”There’s obviously, you know, boats, RVs, cars, you know, in the waterways, so they’ll be dealing with that for some time.”