By: Anna Radinsky/Assistant News Director
Every hurricane season the University conducts trainings and exercises to prepare students, faculty and staff for extreme storms.
Students that live in the Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties are encouraged to go home to their families instead of staying in a residence hall during a hurricane.
“You’ll be safe but you’re not necessarily going to be comfortable sleeping on a mattress in a hallway with 500 of your closest friends,” said Amy Aiken, the director for the emergency management department.
The majority of the 3,200 students that live on campus leave the University during hurricane evacuations, but those on the Modesto Maidique campus who cannot leave are accommodated in the Parkview Hall dorm building.
During the hurricane, students are only allowed to remain in the hallways of Parkview, as being in rooms are a risk to getting hurt by the unexpected effects of the storm, according to Aiken.
When Parkview was constructed in 2013, the hallways were reinforced to have the most amount of strength to best support those that remain on campus during a hurricane.
Parkview is the only building in the University that has enhanced hurricane protection- it has more structural protections from hurricanes than what is specified in Florida Building Codes, which were set after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to have stronger buildings constructed in South Florida.
Parkview also has a backup generator, so if power is lost the air conditioning, phones and computers will continue to work.
Students that live in Bayview on the Biscayne Bay campus are also evacuated to Parkview on MMC to avoid the high risk for storm surge in the area.
Those that live around BBC are asked to always evacuate because the area will always be a storm surge risk area, according to Aiken.
“When a hurricane is making landfall, what it’s basically doing is sucking up the ocean, taking a giant wave of water and crashing depending on where it hits,” Aiken said.
A few inches of water from a storm surge can knock you off your feet. One to two feet of moving water can make your car float, six feet of water can make your car float away and anything higher than nine feet can carry homes away, according to the Weather Channel.
Part of why North and South Carolina were so heavily impacted by Hurricane Florence that made landfall on Friday, Sept. 14, was because of storm surge, Aiken said.
Storm surge risk areas are one of the reasons why people are asked to evacuate areas, but those who are not at risk are not always asked to leave their homes.
“People think that if a hurricane is coming they always have to evacuate,” Aiken said. “But if you’re in a building or home that has been hardened and secured and you’re not in a storm surge evacuation area, you don’t have to evacuate.”
However, homes that are not in storm surge risk areas can still get damaged due to heavy rainfall that can cause flooding. Aiken advised those that live in low-lying areas to evacuate, as well.
Counties provide maps and information as early as possible on what areas are at most risk to prepare citizens for evacuation.
To decide when to call for evacuations, counties and the University follow the patterns and strength of storm paths and tropical storm force winds, which occur before a tropical storm becomes a hurricane, to decide when it will hit landfall.
“If you call for an evacuation too early, people won’t want to leave,” Aiken said. “If you wait before it’s too late, we are at risk for putting people in harm’s way. So, timing is tricky.”
The University does not have to wait for counties to declare evacuation areas. That decision, among others, falls upon top administrators at the University.
This policy group includes the University President Mark B. Rosenberg; Provost; Chief Financial Officer; Chief of Staff; External Relations; Academic and Student Affairs; the Dean of the College of Medicine; the general counsel and faculty senate chair.
Every hurricane season, all top administrators and department heads have an exercise meeting early in the hurricane season to decide on important decisions and to practice emergency scenarios to better prepare and protect students, faculty and staff.
“We go through real life situations. The idea is to challenge ourselves and to throw up scenarios that you don’t want to think about. But burying your head in the sand is not the answer,” Aiken said.
The decisions include when to close and open the University, what needs to be done to further protect the University, where can people be sheltered and how are they going to do it.
This meeting occurs in a dedicated emergency operations center in PG5 to train and exercise for any large and potential emergency. The most recent exercise for hurricane preparation occurred on Tuesday, Sept. 18.
Exercise meetings do not only cover hurricane preparations.
The operations center has to be in a constant state of operation readiness to be fully prepared for any emergency, including hurricanes, tornadoes and even a serious flu season.
“FIU is an all-hazards university, which means that we need to be prepared for anything that can happen to us,” Aiken said.
Every department has a set of plans, called the continuity of operations plans, to outline how to keep their operations continuously running at the bare minimum, if necessary.
Following any emergency event, administrators and faculty have an “after-action” meeting to discuss what worked and what needs improvement to better prepare for the future in any circumstance.
In the case of hurricanes, different storm effects can bring different damages to the University.
“Every storm is different: one storm might be a wind event, another might be a very wet storm, or it might be quick moving. In the case of Florence, it just sat and that wreaked a lot of havoc and created a lot of damage,” Aiken said.
One concern while sheltering is overcrowding.
In the case that there might be too many students sheltering in Parkview, the emergency operations center staff create a backup plan on where else they can shelter students.
An overcapacity of students has not occurred, even though living in the halls can be tight and uncomfortable. Aiken emphasized that it is in the student’s best interest to shelter with their own families, if possible.
“The more real the storm becomes, the more people tend to leave,” said Aiken.
The students and staff that shelter on campus are asked to have three days’ worth of food and water.
To prepare for Hurricane Irma in 2017, The Fresh Food company, the dining hall in the Graham Center, provided boxed lunches for students.
During the hurricane, students are not allowed into dorms until the storm subsides. This also means that they do not shower while sheltering in the hallways.
Students are not the only ones that get sheltered in the University.
The University also has an agreement with Monroe County to shelter their special needs residents, such as the elderly, to be in a shelter that has a backup generator in case the electricity goes out. They were sheltered in the Wellness and Recreation Center last year.
Last year, the University was also asked to take in Monroe County’s general population because of it being storm ready, according to Marc Jean, the assistant director of the Department of Emergency Management.
“FIU is a storm ready site,” Jean said. “Our university has established procedures in the event of a severe storm like a tornado or thunderstorm.”
The sheltered populations between the students and the Monroe County residences did not mix to keep everyone safe, secure, and kept on watch during the storm, according to Aiken.
After a storm is over, students are not allowed back into their dorms until the assessments for property damage are completed by essential personnel staff that stay on both campuses during the hurricane.
To keep students, faculty and staff calm about how and what to prepare for, FIU online offers an online course on how to prepare for a hurricane. The course is on prep.fiu.edu.
“We have faculty and staff that are not from the area and don’t know what a hurricane is,” Aiken said. “We have some students that are unsure of hurricanes, so we really try to make sure that resources are available, so people know what to do.”
For more information and resources on how to prepare for hurricanes and other emergencies, you can visit dem.fiu.edu.
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