Real Estate Disruptors
Let's Disrupt Real Estate. What is Real Estate? Not all markets are created equal. Gulf Coast to Space Coast talks to the leaders in the industry throughout Florida just as if we were sitting across a dinner table. OH! and our hosts and guests change with every episode just to keep you on your toes. We cover the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Atlantic Ocean, think Tampa, Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Daytona Beach, Space Coast, Miami. We talk about investing, marketing, staging, and many many more related topics. Start listening to the Real Estate Disruptors and see what Real Estates Past, Present, and Future will bring?
Real Estate Disruptors
Navigating Hurricane Preparedness: Expert Tips from Pinellas County Emergency Director Kathy Perkins
What does it take to stay safe during a hurricane in coastal Florida? Discover the invaluable insights from Kathy Perkins, Director of Pinellas County Emergency Management Services, who brings over three decades of experience, including her firsthand involvement in Hurricane Andrew. Kathy helps us navigate the unique challenges that each storm brings, from storm surges and high winds to inland flooding. Learn why it's crucial not to get fixated on the "cone of uncertainty," and hear Kathy's expert advice on staying informed and understanding the broader risks.
Ever felt "hurricane fatigue"? We tackle this critical issue by reflecting on personal experiences with major storms like Hurricane Charlie, Ian, and Irma. Kathy shares the complexities of hurricane forecasting and stresses the importance of staying vigilant despite the unpredictable nature of these storms. We dive into the challenges of evacuation planning, especially for vulnerable populations, and discuss the necessity of preparing for best, mid, and worst-case scenarios. This segment aims to keep you ready for rapid changes in storm intensity and direction, emphasizing the dangers of complacency.
Preparation is key, and that's why we focus on practical strategies for evacuation and hurricane preparedness in our final chapter. Drawing parallels to everyday safety measures, you'll get practical advice on creating a well-thought-out plan tailored to your family's needs, including pets and specific medical requirements. Learn about the importance of timely preparation and how to use resources like Alert Pinellas and the Ready Pinellas app. Kathy's insights will guide you through knowing your risk, making a plan, and staying informed to ensure your safety during hurricane season.
Hello everybody and welcome back to the podcast. I am Mike Webb and I am pleased to announce our guest today. We're going to take it out of real estate and bring it back into something that you're going to find very important to you here living on the coast in Florida, and I have a special guest today. Her name is Kathy Perkins and she is the Director of Pinellas County Emergency Management Services. Welcome to the show, kathy. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Thanks, mike, I'm great.
Speaker 1:All right, so we will do a quick little bio on you and you can tell us how you got to where you are and why in the world do you love to jump into a crisis situation and take the bull by the horn, so to speak? So how long you been in?
Speaker 2:been doing this emergency management for over 30 years. That actually started after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 down in Miami-Dade County. So it wasn't anything I went to school for. I didn't even know this was a job and over the years it has transitioned. Now you can go to school, you could get degrees in emergency management. It really is exciting because we are dealing with every facet of the community and I love talking to every group out there for what role they could play. So I know you said that this is kind of removed from the Realty Group, but it really isn't, because you're all emergency managers too, whether that's within your companies or with your clients and within your own homes.
Speaker 1:Great circle back, because, yes, we are crises management professionals. If you've ever been in a real estate transaction, there's typically about a half a dozen crises before you get to closing. So, ironically enough which we didn't know this I was working for a company called State Farm in 1993 when Andrew hit and my father and I volunteer, uh, volunteer. We didn't volunteer. The company, uh engaged us to leave here and go down to Miami to help out other state farm agents. And wow, that was a sobering event for me in my life. It literally looked like a. If I knew what a bomb looked like going off, that's what it looked like. It was incredible. So what a way to get inducted into your business is by being down there. It was crazy times. It really was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think unless you've really experienced a large scale hurricane, people can't picture it right, because you think of your home as your safe space. It's where you go every night, you get to lay down on your pillows. But during disasters, you know, we may ask people to leave the safety of their homes and you've seen the kind of devastation that can occur and that could be from you know multiple hazards that are present with hurricanes, storm surge being the most life-threatening. And if you remember, a few years ago down in Lee County with Hurricane Ian, we had houses that were completely washed off of their foundations.
Speaker 2:Wind is another big hazard, so you can have winds up over 180 miles per hour, you can have tornadoes and downbursts, so all things we need to be thinking about. And then we can have a lot of rainfall too. So we saw that again with Hurricane Ian, with over 20 inches of rainfall falling across almost the entire state of Florida. So you talked about it being a coastal issue. Hurricanes can be across the entire state. So we really need people to pay attention to when a storm is coming, how far out those risks extend and what that risk is, so you can do that assessment for your own home.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know what I have found, being a lifelong Florida resident, lifelong Clearwater resident, finally, after watching these for many, many years, every storm takes on its own unique characteristics and sometimes it is the coastal storm surge that gets you which is the most dangerous. I live about 100, less than 100 yards from the open coast and I have to be very mindful of that, remembering what I've seen in these other storms. But they also can be wind events. They can be wind events not even close to the eye of the storm, and then the inland flooding which we see in Orlando all the time from these storms. So there's so many things that looking at a storm can.
Speaker 1:You can get sucked into watching that slow motion track and thinking, oh, it's only a cat one, it's only a cat two, with all the new things happening and rapid intensification and all these things. I certainly don't understand. I guess I'm going to kick it back to you. What would you recommend and what would you tell everybody? That if you're watching a storm and it's looking like it's going to make a Tampa Clearwater landfall, everybody that if you're watching a storm and it's looking like it's going to make a Tampa Clearwater landfall, don't get caught?
Speaker 2:up in the what Don't get caught up in just looking at the cone. So you hear a lot about this cone of uncertainty and that cone only tells you where the center of the storm is going to be two-thirds of the time. What it doesn't tell you and you just touched on this is that those wind fields can extend out for hundreds of miles from the center of the storm and, as we saw with Hurricane Ian, that storm was coming to us here in Tampa Bay right Until it wasn't, and it was a 20-mile shift in the trajectory of the storm as it came off of the coast of Cuba. And we heard horror stories of people in Lee County who looked at the cone days out and said, oh, it's gone to Tampa, it's not going to be our problem, and they stopped paying attention to the storm. Well, you know, storms change, mother Nature changes. They speed up, they slow down, they stall, they stall.
Speaker 2:So that's why you really have to look at what are the hazards with each storm. So we use that cone as a guideline. You know I always say it's kind of mother's way of saying heads up, something bad might be coming right. So once you see that that cone is anywhere near you, you know, start paying attention. And that's one of our key tenets is staying informed, right, and those advisories will come out every six hours. So it's a good idea every six hours or you could sleep through the night, right, if it's not right on you. You know, I mean, just make sure that you're checking in on a daily basis and then looking at what are the local forecasters telling you it's going to look like, so even like Adalia. Adalia was 100 miles offshore, right Didn't make landfall here, but we had over 1,500 homes flooded down in St Petersburg, right In the Shore Acres, riviera Bay neighborhoods.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So you don't have to have a direct landfalling storm to have impacts from that. So you really want to look at is there a storm surge watch or warning being issued? How much rainfall, right, so people get caught up in that? Oh, I live 100 miles inland. It's not going to be a problem for me, but if you've got 22 inches of rain that falls on top of you in less than a 24-hour period, that water is not going to be able to drain off quickly. So we saw a lot of neighborhoods that were flooding, and I think this is something that's really important when realtors are working with clients and especially these people that are new to Florida and maybe they're only used to storms in the wintertime letting them understand what their risks are, helping them evaluate the homes that they're looking at. We get that question a lot about flood zones versus storm surge and evacuation zones. They're not the same things, and sometimes you might be in an evacuation zone but not in a FEMA flood zone.
Speaker 1:So you're not.
Speaker 2:You're not required to have flood insurance, so it may not come up during your real estate transaction, but that doesn't mean that you aren't at risk. So really important so that's our first tenant that we tell people is you need to know your risk for where you're located, and that's great for homeowners and business owners alike, right? So even your offices here. What is your risk here? I think you guys are probably I'd be high and dry here. I don't know. I haven't looked up your address.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have a good elevation here, but this is actually a building that I would come evacuate to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this looks like it's a concrete block building, yeah, and you want to look at your windows. What is the shape of the roof that you had? Some roofs are better at handling winds than others, so there's a lot of factors that you can look at. What is the finished floor elevation? So a lot of great things that when you're working with your realtor to look at that. I know when I moved up here from Miami-Dade, my realtor probably was like who is this woman? Because I was like I want a non-Thema flood zone, I want to be outside of the storm surge zone and I want a house with hurricane protection. You know, I wasn't asking about how many bedrooms and bathrooms and square footage or the school zone.
Speaker 1:I was looking at it from a very different perspective. That's funny. Coming from your background, that makes sense. So you left Miami Dade, you came, you moved to you know a hot area that you need to be concerned about storms from a white hot area. So this has been following you your whole life and you know we talk about these other events. I remember back in 2012, we had a rain event here by a tropical storm Donna. I think it was in June. We had like four days of rain flooded out local here. I don't remember the exact inch count and that's a situation.
Speaker 1:So when we talk about Kathy's role, it's not just for hurricanes, it's any kind of emergency preparation. And I know personally, I learned I believe it was either 04, 05. We all remember the 04 that lived here, the 04, 05 hurricanes, but it was Hurricane Charlie and I had gone to bed that night. My mother at the time was being stubborn and would not evacuate. So I went to my mother's house and said, well, at least I'll go drown with her, I guess I'll help her swim out. And because I went to bed that's house and said, well, at least I'll go drown with her, I guess I'll help her swim out.
Speaker 1:And because I went to bed that night and it was headed right for Tarpon Springs, I went to bed, I woke up and Charlie, talking about your cone had made a hard right hand turn, dumped into Fort Myers, to the Boca area down there, as we know, it almost busted out of the cone. It made such a right-hand turn. So that's something, like you said, people really need to be mindful of. And the other thing I will tell you my plan and my fouled thinking, my flawed thinking, was well, it's only a two, I'm going to go to bed.
Speaker 1:It's coming into Tarpon, I'm going to stay here with my mother. I'll turn the generator on for later. But it also not only made a hard right-hand turn and almost got out of the cone, it went from a two to a four. It experienced that rapid intensification. So I learned a very valuable lesson with Hurricane Charlie that if in fact I'm going to evacuate, I need to evacuate long enough out that I don't. I-75 doesn. And I can't do it based upon the storm's intensity at that time, because it is subject to change at any time.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. That's where that staying informed is so critical, and this season that's why they have the really high projections for numbers. Right, the waters are really warm and we have seen over the last 10 years that a lot of the storms that have become Category 4 and 5 storms were tropical storms a couple of days before so and we had that really fluke of a storm in Acapulco that went from a tropical storm to a cat five in 24 hours. So you know, that's one of the things that we're looking at very closely. So we have daily calls with the state division of emergency management and the national hurricane center. We're talking with our local National Weather Service partners and we're really looking at what are they saying. So are they talking about intensification?
Speaker 2:And when we do our planning, we do what I like to call the BMW. So it's your best mid and worst case scenarios. So your best is really. What are they saying? It's going to be now right, so we don't go with no impacts. That's the hope. Right, we have nothing right, but our best is what is the minimum, and then our mid is if it was a little bit stronger than that, and then our worst is we look at usually, you know sometimes it could be two or three categories higher, and we do this with every storm.
Speaker 2:So with Ian early on, we actually had as our worst case scenario potentially category four or five here in Tampa Bay. So that way we could already be thinking about what is our clearance time, how many people are we going to ask to evacuate? And people need to keep in mind that I know from the perspective of an individual, you're thinking it's just you and your home that you've got to take care of. Right, as a business owner, you may be thinking about what you have to do for your business. As a county EM person, I'm thinking holistically this giant county with a million people, you know, thousands and thousands of tourists here, and we have hospitals, we have nursing homes, we have assisted living facilities that all have very vulnerable people that may have to evacuate. So it gets very complex very quickly.
Speaker 1:The logistics of trying to evacuate and how long it's going to take and are the roads going to get jammed up? So I think too that people, you know, hurricane season already started. We watched this one move out there, a very powerful storm. Now we're having a little Saharan dust. Come on dust. It makes beautiful sunsets, keeps it warm, but it keeps the hurricanes down too. It won't last forever.
Speaker 1:But I think what happens sometimes, and I don't know if you have some advice for us how to overcome this, but I think we get hurricane fatigue. Sometimes we watch three or four storms and they're in slow motion and we're turning on every day and we're watching them and they finally go to Mexico or they go someplace else, or they spin back out into the Atlantic and spin off and we start thinking well, this one will do the same. How would you tell people that have been through the 04, 05 hurricane? There was a point in 04 that we were preparing for a hurricane every other weekend Different hurricane, by the way. So when people, when it's, you know, late August or in the middle of September, at the peak of the season and they've already been watching these things for, you know, six weeks brew out there in the Gulf? How do you keep them encouraged to? This might be the one. Stay on your toes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a huge problem. You talked about it before. Each storm has a different personality, right? Each one is different and people that pigeonhole into I survived the last one, or the last one turned and it didn't hit me, or the last one wasn't so bad. We actually heard that from people in Lee County, right with Charlie because, or Irma when Irma came through, the storm surge was maybe three or four feet. So you know, they saw that and they thought, oh, it's going to be the same when Ian comes in. Well, ian was 10 to 15 feet. So you know, people based life-saving decisions of old information or past experience, and I can't stress that enough. It's like every time you get in your car, right, and you put, do you, do you decide whether or not to put your seatbelt on Right, that's a life-saving measure that you take and thank goodness you don't get in an accident every day, right, but you've done something to help protect yourself every time you get in the car, right, cause you never know, never know when you're going to have a car accident, right?
Speaker 2:So we're telling you that when there's a hurricane coming or a tropical storm, when something's brewing, it's kind of like putting your seatbelt on right, it's paying attention, it's watching that storm, it's having that plan. And that's the second key thing. We tell people you want to make a plan because you got to think about who in my family do I need to plan for? Can I stay in my home? So if you live 100 feet from the water, I'm going to tell you please don't stay in your home, right, you need to go. So you know these are all the things that we have to think about.
Speaker 2:So I trust me, I get fatigued too. We work days and days, usually before most people are even paying attention, and we work long after the storm may have passed, when most people have gone back to normal. So I totally get the fatigue thing. But we're talking about people's lives and we have people out there that are electric dependent, right. So when the power goes out, that means that they could die, and those people we need to make sure that we've got plans for right. We have a lot of mobile home parks. Here in Pinellas County we have 44,000 mobile home units very susceptible to high winds, so even if they're not in an area for storm surge, we actually evacuate them with our level A evacuation.
Speaker 1:That's an A evacuation.
Speaker 2:Yes, because we worry about those high winds and we've got a lot of older mobile homes and you could have a tree come down on top of your mobile home. You could have a downburst or a tornado happen. You've got a lot of flying debris with these storms.
Speaker 1:Seems like the storms always sniff out the mobile home parks. I believe, it feels that way. Anyways, maybe that's just because where we see, the damage a lot.
Speaker 2:Because they're very vulnerable. Yeah, and I think even with the last few tornadoes that we've had that come through here, they always seem to pick on the mobile home parks. It feels that way, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:And those are the people that we least want to have to suffer those type of burdens. So every year, every year I've been doing this a long time they start talking about the local news channels will do their stories on, you know, preparing for the storm. You know they sell drama and you're the opposite. You're getting all this information and you're taking it and you're dissecting it and disseminating it and trying to advise the county on the on the best way to go. But every year I start second guessing myself on what I need to have, if I do need a hurricane kit. So what would you say? Uh, for somebody like myself that knows better should have plenty of water and the resources and the batteries and the medications. What should you tell me to either relax or get better prepared?
Speaker 2:Always have a kit, always be prepared, and you can get great information. So here in Pinellas County, you can go to disasterpinellasgov, you can download our Ready Pinellas app and you can get our hurricane guide online or digitally. We also have that embedded into our Ready Pinellas app. Inside of that has a list of all the types of things that you might need. So you really need to be thinking about right, because it's we recommend one gallon per person per day. Well, do you have pets? How many people in your family? So you're going to have to customize your kit to your needs, and you have to. So if you're staying, your kit might look a little bit different than if you were evacuating right.
Speaker 2:Because if you're staying, you want to make sure that you've got tarps and you want to make sure that you've got your generator and everything ready. You know, like you've got to identify what is your safe room within your home. You know, heaven forbid, we start to get those really extreme winds and you need to move into an interior space within your home.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's when it's critical to have a weather radio, maybe during the storm that you know, if you do get some, maybe you've already lost power and you have a weather radio, maybe they can tell you that there's some tornadic activity in your area and you get into the interior.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and sometimes, even when cell phones you can't make a call, sometimes you can still get text messages. So we recommend that people sign up for Alert Pinellas. We'll actually send texts out to their phone. You'll also can get texts from the National Weather Service or you know, like during that lock time or extreme winds period, and I do want to make a point. So for those people that cannot stay at home, we do offer free shelters in the community because we heard from people that went through Hurricane Ian in Lee County. Some people didn't know that those resources were there so they stayed home. Right. So we have shelters that we open right, general population shelters. We have shelters with people for pets, so you could bring your pet in with you. We don't want you to stay home because of Fido right, bring Fido in with you. And we also have special needs shelters. So for those people that might need assistance with activities of daily living, people that have mobility issues or medical issues, they can come into these shelters where we have Department of Health nurses. We have backup generators in there. You know we can do at least people that are on oxygen concentrators. And then we work with some of our local hospitals for people that have higher levels of need.
Speaker 2:So you want to make sure you're thinking about everybody in your family Transportation you talked about that, about. You know, when we have a lot of counties evacuating, we end up with this just clogged traffic all the way to Orlando. You don't have to evacuate hundreds of miles, you can go tens of miles Right. So get to know the evacuation zones and pay attention to which zones are being evacuated. Like you said, we might actually plan for a higher evacuation level depending upon what it looks like the storm is going to do. Evacuation level depending upon what it looks like the storm's going to do. So even though they might be talking about the storm being a cat one today, I might be already planning for a cat three, and then we might evacuate up to the level C. So we got to be thinking about having all these contingencies, even within your own plan, so people can get out.
Speaker 1:You know, as we were talking before the show started about our location right here in Clearwater, we have a very structurally sound building here and it is actually one of my contingency plans. As I told you, I live about less than 100 yards from the open gulf but I'm not in a flood zone so, ironically enough, I have newer construction. My elevation is good. But I do also understand that man, that storm comes in just a little bit to the northeast of me and I've got tidal surge and storm surge to deal with.
Speaker 1:If it comes in a little bit to the south or west of me, I should say that's a whole other issue. I've got the wind and different things that I really need to worry about. So my plan is I have about three to four different locations, probably all within 20 miles, that I can go to. I have family in Tampa I can go to. I can come to this office building right here and bring my family, and I also have, you know, one north and one south that I can go to. So I'm going to watch this as close as I can and make the decision based on the best information that I have at that time. So I think that a lot of people should probably have some kind of contingencies in their evacuation plan.
Speaker 2:And I love that and I love that you've done that. You've thought about what are other places I could go. So hopefully this office here is something that could be a contingency for the families that work here. Right so, for the other people that work in this office, make sure so you guys are going to go through this. Right so, for the other people that work in this office, make sure so you guys are going to go through this. Right You're going to go through the know, your risk, you know. Find out who's in which evacuation level. And then how is you as a business, how can you support your employees during a storm? Right so know who has to evacuate, where they're going, make accommodations there and they might be bringing Fido and their cats and all you know, maybe their aunts and uncles or grandparents in here have a plan.
Speaker 2:Stock up on the food. Do you have a backup generator here? Really, just think about it and then pool your resources right, because that's one of the things with having a kit sometimes is it can get expensive. Right, we got another tax holiday coming up, I think in August.
Speaker 1:I love all the tax holidays.
Speaker 2:Thank you, so it's a great, great time to stock up on stuff. You know, go get your BOGOs. You know, look for coupons. But you could pool your resources so, as a company or your neighbors or your homeowners association, get together with your neighbors, think about how you can work together to put maybe somebody's got the generator, somebody else commits to buying the gasoline right To be able to power it up. You know, maybe someone's got the mini fridge. So, to work together, look out for each other, because that's really what we need to do. I cannot solve all of the challenges that are out there, so the more prepared that we are at the individual and the business level, that will really help us. You know, get back on our feet afterwards.
Speaker 1:So, if I am hearing you right, it comes down to a very profound concept, which would be personal responsibility. Kathy is going to give us all the available information, point us with the right resources where we need to go, but at the end of the day, we have to take responsibility for ourselves and our own families and pets and make those decisions.
Speaker 2:And Mike, you talked about something I always like to call it analysis paralysis. Right, Because I think people just start. They just start watching the TV and they're just staring at that cone. Right, they're watching it for hours on end, and I want to remind people that time is the one resource you cannot get more of. So there will come a point in time where it's no longer safe to evacuate, and the longer you wait, the fewer options you have. Right, Because the buses will stop running. You know there might not be as many resources available, so we would encourage even employers, right?
Speaker 2:So do you need to keep your employees? Do you need to stay open until tropical storm force winds arrive? No, probably not, right, Unless you are emergency providers. You know. Shut down a little bit early. Let your employees go home. Make sure that your employees are in a safe place. Make sure they've been able to harden their homes or really put up their shutters or bring in all their lawn furniture. I was surprised at how long it took me to bring in everything from the outside of my house.
Speaker 1:How to dig it and get all my lawn furniture out of the pool.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah. And then like, where do you stick it? I had my barbecue grill in my living room and you know it was just crazy. I had lizards running around my house forever. But you know, I mean, let's think collectively, how do we work through this? How do we prepare for this? And that's really going to help us because there's good. Like I said, there's going to come that point where we have no more time left to do anything and then people are going to be stuck in horrible situations. We've heard the 911 calls. I don't want that to happen.
Speaker 1:And I know that it's a moving target to ask, because it depends on the speed of the storm, the size of the storm, where the storm's coming in. But is there a typical time frame that you would say, okay, batten down the hatches, or is it more? The wind speeds have gotten to a certain level, like now? It's better to just ride it out where you are. We'll send help when the storm clears.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think everybody has to determine how long will it take you to get your home ready right? So if you already have impact windows, much easier than if you've got to be putting up plywood.
Speaker 2:You know if you've got those shutters that you can push a button and they go down much easier than if you have to climb up a ladder and put them on. So everybody needs to. Again, that's part of your planning process, right? You need to think about how long it's going to take you to secure your home and I would say you know, traditionally watches and warnings are really good.
Speaker 2:I know it's funny because people used to say they'd look to see if I was putting my shutters up. You were the catalyst and I'm usually doing it days in advance because I know I'm going to have to go to work and it's going to be hard for me to get back home. But you know, I mean really you could use that watch and that warning, so you know you're going to get that time period and then it's like once you hear the one, like you can start putting up your shutter, so you don't have to shutter up everything. You could do the hardest ones first. Leave the easiest ones. I used to leave a few off so I'd get some daylight.
Speaker 1:I could see and not feel like I was, yeah, incarcerated.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's been some storm seasons where I've left a lot of them up, just opened up enough, just in case I had to get out. After I saw the national hurricanes forecast this year, I asked my HOA president if I could go ahead and put them up now and leave them up to October I'm kidding, of course and he kidded me back and said absolutely not. That'll be a $200 a day, fine, or whatever it was.
Speaker 2:But that's a problem too, because if you have people that don't live here, you're around. That's right. Are they? Who's closing their shutters? Because, especially if you live in a condominium right, the interior walls aren't built for the wind once it gets inside. So you know. That's why, no matter where you were you know, live or work have those conversations about how do we prepare for ourselves, how do we prepare the structure, who's going to do what as realtors. I think that's a great opportunity, you know to be able to have those conversations.
Speaker 1:That's a great point and a great way to go back and touch your clients is hey, want to let you know it's hurricane season and this is the type of thing, and maybe tell them about your app and download your app.
Speaker 2:We've got lots of resources and we even created a brochure here for boat owners. We've got the second highest vessel registration in the state of Florida. We all saw what happened to the vessels down in Lee County so you know people securing their boats or moving their boats in advance. So lots of great information we appreciate. You know you guys work with a lot of people coming in and moving around, so the more that you can help us help people get prepared, truly appreciate that.
Speaker 1:Well, we will certainly do that. We appreciate having you come on the show today and share this information, so I'm going to have you repeat it one last time Give me the number one thing that you would have people do, the number one source of information, whether it's the app or a website that you talked about and then give us your last personal tip that you would wrap it up with.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to give you three things you have to do, right, you need to know your risk, you need to make a plan and you need to stay informed. Okay so, know your risk, and I'm going to give you one website. It's your one-stop shop, blue Skies. You could go today and get information on how to prepare, and then you can use it during gray skies, because it will have updated information for what's happening. It's disasterpinellasgov, and if you live in another county, just Google your local emergency management county emergency management and you'll find the equivalent within your county. So disasterpinellasgov, and that's going to get you that information. You can also sign up for Alert Panellist and we will text you information right to your phone to say, hey, pay attention, the storm is coming.
Speaker 1:I'm on that. I need you to evacuate.
Speaker 2:I've been on that for a while or a tornado is coming, because with hurricanes we usually have days With tornadoes, you might only have minutes to prepare. So we want to make sure that people are using this for all hazards like we talked about.
Speaker 1:And when that alert goes off, it goes off. It's like the Amber Alert or some of them going off. So we want to thank you so much for coming out sharing this information with us today and appreciate all the hard work you and your organization do to keep us safe during these trying times. We see quite a bit here in Florida. So that's it for this edition of the podcast. Guys, we will catch you all next time on the Gulf Coast to Space Coast. See you next time.