Hurricane Debby raises Manatee County communication issues

Catfish were swimming down Jason Powell’s street Aug. 5 before he received an alert from Manatee County telling him to evacuate his Mill Creek home during Hurricane Debby.

When the report came, it read, "Manatee Dam doing strategic release to cause dangerous swift moving water and flooding. Leave area NOW. Shelters available. Highwater vehicles being staged in area. Call 311 for information. Use 911 for emergencies ONLY.”

“It confused me,” Powell said. “What does this mean? What are they talking about?” 

The storm passed, and Powell's home escaped damage, but questions remain surrounding the county’s communication during the disaster and since. Manatee County residents want answers.

Several spoke at the Aug. 13 Manatee County Commission meeting to request an independent study be done to evaluate the county's response to the storm, or lack thereof.

"We don't deserve to be silenced," said Jill Sauchintz, a Lakewood Ranch resident whose home flooded. "Please, respond to our emails."

Commissioner George Kruse, a resident of Greyhawk Landing, said citizens were “blowing up his phone” during the storm. 

“I jumped on the Facebook page for Greyhawk Landing because we have a lot of people (who received an alert to evacuate),” he said. 

Some of Kruse’s neighbors were attempting to follow the county’s order to evacuate until Kruse told them Upper Manatee River Road already was flooded. 

He said he shared standard dam protocol and explained that they most likely received the alert because the surrounding roads were going to flood, not their homes.

Would such an alert cause residents to evacuate their homes and attempt to drive through standing water because they were told "Leave area NOW" as opposed to staying in their homes where it was safe?

The alerts sent out by Manatee County were through the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. The alerts are sent to mobile phones, radios, televisions and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather radio.  

Director of Public Safety Jodie Fiske said the area of danger is determined on a map, and any resident within that area receives an alert. 

“If you received that message with the emergency alert, you might not have been in imminent danger, but somebody in that area was, and they were getting that same alert,” Fiske said. “The second that we received the alerts that water was flowing, an emergency message was sent out, and that’s exactly how things are supposed to work.” 

Residents who received the messages, however, said they found the message confusing, and many residents in neighborhoods that flooded didn’t receive an alert at all. 

“We had no warning that our neighborhoods were going to get flooded,” said Joshua Sharkey, vice president of the Gates Creek Homeowners Association. “I personally lost my car on 112th Street East.”

Like Powell, many residents who received the alerts had no choice but to ignore them. By the time he received them at about 10:30 a.m. and again around 12:30 p.m., he estimated the water was 8 inches deep on his street. 

Powell's wife, Tina Miller, had sent him a text at 7:21 a.m. to say she was headed back home because she couldn’t safely get out of the neighborhood in her SUV three hours before the first alert. 

Manatee County followed up with one Facebook post, a half hour after the second alert, and a press release that didn’t provide much more information.

All the communications said that high water vehicles and transport units were positioned at key locations downstream of the Manatee Dam, but didn’t specify where people should go. 

Powell said residents in Mill Creek were utilizing the neighborhood Facebook page to see who needed what.

Social media is a proven asset for disseminating information during disasters because of its reach. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2021, 72% of Americans used social media, 97% owned a cell phone and 50% went to social media for their news.

FEMA offers a training called Social Media in Emergency Management because not only are government agencies using social media to disseminate information, they’re using it to collect information to better place their resources.

That’s how Kruse used his personal Facebook page, aside from the county. 

“People wanted to know about the animal shelter (Bishop location), so I was like I’ll go check on it because people don’t want to wait three weeks, they want to know now,” he said. 

In addition to saving lives, FEMA recommends using social media during a crisis to engage the community and build trust.  

Kruse’s post about the animal shelter received over 12,000 views, 78 shares and over 50 comments thanking him for providing an update. 

In contrast, Manatee County turned off commenting in December 2023 on all of its social media. During the storm, Manatee County did allow comments on its two live streaming posts, but there was no live streaming post on the worst day of the storm Aug. 5.

“It would have been nice to be allowed to comment during the storm,” wrote Maxwell Allan in a post from the county's press conference on Aug. 6.

Bill Logan, the county’s information outreach manager, told the East County Observer in April that social media pages are to disseminate information, not to provide a public forum. 

Kruse called it “asinine” to close down the comments to begin with and said Hurricane Debby was just an “extreme example.” 

“Because I’m the only one who responds, I had to act as the de facto county,” he said. 

From Aug. 4 through Aug. 6, Manatee County posted to Facebook 18 times. In that same time period, Sarasota County posted to Facebook 96 times. 

Manatee was mainly redirecting residents to its website, which has 19 different tabs from “weather information” to “lost pets.” 

Commission Chair Mike Rahn said the county did good, not great, but the staff learns something new from each hurricane or major storm.

“We took over 3,000 calls on 311 and opened up the website,” Rahn said. “Social media can be a piece we look at as part of this independent study. They might have recommendations for us.”