Gov. Jeb Bush confers, left, with Craig Fugate,
right, director of the Emergency Operations Center in
Tallahassee, Florida after a hurricane preparedness
seminar at the State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee.
Palm Beach Post
Hurricanes 'not a joke,' Bush warns
By Eliot Kleinberg
TAMPA -- Ten years ago, South Florida businessman John Bush [Jeb] huddled in the hallways of a friend's home with his wife and children as Hurricane Andrew raged.
Now, John Ellis Bush is governor of Florida and worries about the millions of people who were born or moved to South Florida after Andrew. Or who felt its breezes in Boca Raton or emptied grocery shelves in Jupiter and believed they had experienced it.
His message Wednesday at the opening of the Florida Governor's Hurricane Conference: "We're not kidding. It's not a joke."
Bush "is one of the few governors who's been in the eye wall of a major hurricane," National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield mused. "If any."
Bush, then a developer, had evacuated his home at Deering Bay, near the coast in southern Miami-Dade County, and had gone west to stay with a friend. With him had been his wife, Columba; their three children; Columba's mother; and two Secret Service agents -- he was, after all, the son of the president of the United States. They arrived around 9 p.m. and waited. No one talked about politics or business. They just watched the news reports grow more and more grim.
Growing up in Houston, Bush said, "my recollection was it blew a little bit, it rained a lot. We got to go outside and play in the rain. This was not like that."
The children were put to bed about 1:30 a.m. A little more than an hour later, the house began to shake.
"There was this feeling," Bush said. "It got like the house was going to implode. It was a very eerie, scary feeling."
Bush told the emergency workers Wednesday their efforts had been steeled by the Andrew experience and a plague of natural and man-made disasters since. But he said he is concerned people haven't caught on.
"Human nature is fairly consistent," Bush said. "We all respond to emergencies when they happen, rather than planning in advance."
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Bush, agency heads get briefed on hurricane season
Wednesday, June 5, 2002
By BRENDAN FARRINGTON, Associated Press
TALLAHASSEE - The state needs to do a better job of not only telling people who should evacuate during a hurricane, but who should stay home and ride out the storm, Gov. Jeb Bush and his agency heads heard Tuesday.
Residents in flood zones need to leave when a storm threatens, but often people outside of those areas join in the exodus not realizing they may be safer at home, Department of Emergency Management Director Craig Fugate told officials.
Decades ago, ocean surges during hurricanes caused the most deaths, Fugate said. But in the last 20 years, freshwater flooding caused 59 percent of hurricane deaths and ocean surges only 1 percent, he said.
"In Florida, the deaths that have occurred in the last five years by freshwater flooding could all have been avoided if people had done one thing - stayed in their home for about 24 hours," Fugate said.
Fugate also warned officials that many people in Florida have recently moved here and have not experienced a devastating hurricane, so they may not take them as seriously. He said there needs to be a "hurricane culture" in which people realize the threat of storms and how to prepare for them.
"Anybody that lived through Hurricane Andrew, when there's a storm out there, they react entirely different than people in other parts of the state because their hurricane culture came back with a vengeance," Fugate said.
When Andrew hit South Florida on Aug. 24, 1992, it became one of the most expensive natural disasters in the United States, causing $30.5 billion in damages and killing 43 people in Florida.
Bush, who lived in Miami during Hurricane Andrew, said he shares Fugate's concerns.
"I do worry that a whole lot of Floridians have never experienced the kind of storm I personally experienced 10 years ago," Bush said….
