A look at the damage after Hurricane Idalia slammed Florida as a Category 3 storm

Statement

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"Well, to be honest with you, we got lucky.

We started off this morning at about 6:30 at the emergency operations enter, looking at a potential Cat 3 hurricane making landfall and coming straight to Tallahassee. But, as we now know, when it hit landfall, it actually went due east, we were impacted, and we do have damage. But it could have been much worse for the Tallahassee area.

But you are correct that this is the strongest storm, I believe, in history that has hit the Big Bend area. And I know a lot of my colleagues and mayors of other communities up and down the Gulf Coast are in a massive rebuilding, recovery stage as well."

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"We do. We have a lot of trees down.

One thing about Tallahassee is that we are a Tree City USA; 55 percent of our city is actually under a tree canopy. So, our concerns, obviously are, when you have high winds and trees and power lines, they do not mix very well.

So, as a result between the sustained winds that we did impact here in Tallahassee, we did have a lot of trees down, a lot of trees that fell on power lines. They're blocking roads. We're out in the process right now. And, unfortunately, the massive oak on the grounds of the governor's mansion fell down today. And we're sorry to see that happen.

But we're glad that no one was hurt when it did come down."

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"Well, we laughed and say we had backup plans to the backup plans to the plan itself. And we started early.

And I will give you some examples. Number one, communication is key. And we began communicating with our community. Let me remind you, we have a municipal population of 200,000, another 100,000 in the county with a student population of 70,000. So it's very important for us to communicate, and let everyone know that we have a significant storm event coming and be prepared.

As a result, we didn't have the long lines at the gas pump or in the grocery store. People took care of business, but we did it an orderly fashion. As an institution, we are the largest municipal service provider in the region. We were out checking over 4,000 miles of transmission and just distribution, electric lines to make sure that they were clear, checking our sewer system, our stormwater system, our water systems.

And as a result of that activity up front, I think that our stormwater and our water systems, they all worked very well. But we also ramped up our manpower. We tripled the size of our electric utility department by reaching out for our mutual aid agreements as far away as Nebraska, Oklahoma, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, and we had other municipalities that sent their crews to Tallahassee.

Prior to the storm, we stationed our assets all across the community. And so, as the storm moved through our community, we were ready to respond, went straight out, had our emergency response to the first assessment. And here we are."

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"So we are used to having these type of weather events, not necessarily a direct hit, but we usually are impacted one way or the other in the Tallahassee community by a tropical storm event, say.

Most of the time, they go to the west of us actually, not the east of us. That's what made this one a little bit more unique. I think what is concerning is, when we look at the size and the strength of the storm events as they're coming through now, we're seeing a lot more intensity even in our summertime rainstorms that take place, let alone these massive storm events.

So it does cause pause and make you think about the environment and global warming and what it's doing to all of our communities. So, we are impacted, usually, maybe on an annual basis or every other year from some type of a massive storm event or tropical storm event."

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"Thank you."

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