Cape CopCast
Welcome to "The Cape CopCast," the official podcast of the Cape Coral Police Department.
Hosted by Officer Mercedes Simonds, and Lisa Greenberg from our Public Affairs team, this podcast dives into the heart of Cape Coral PD's public safety, community initiatives, and the inner workings of our police department. Each episode brings you insightful discussions, interviews with key community figures, and expert advice on safety.
Cape CopCast
Chief's Chat #1: Hurricane Season & High-water Vehicles
Join Cape CopCast hosts Lisa Greenberg and Officer Mercedes Simonds for the inaugural Chief's Chat!
Curious about how a police department navigates extreme weather events? In this new weekly segment of the Cape CopCast, we talk to Chief Anthony Sizemore about what we've changed after Hurricane Ian and what we learned from Hurricane Milton. Discover the meticulous preparedness and collaborative efforts that lead to successful storm coverage. Chief Sizemore highlights the significance of the Alpha/Bravo schedule, a dynamic system ensuring all officers are on duty during emergencies so the department runs like a well-oiled machine when disaster strikes.
The conversation takes a thoughtful turn when personal stories illustrate the urgent necessity for better infrastructure and resources like high-water vehicles to combat increasingly unpredictable weather patterns.
We mark the beginning of a new era in community engagement, inviting you to actively participate by sending in questions or topics. This commitment to transparency ensures you’re up to date with significant news stories and community events.
Tune in every Friday as Chief Sizemore joins us to keep you informed and prepared!
Welcome back to a special edition episode of the Cape Cop cast. We're launching something new and we're going to call it the Chief's Chat. I'm one of your hosts, Lisa Greenberg.
Speaker 2:And I'm Officer Mercedes Simons. Together we make up the Public Affairs Office and today we have our special guest that makes the Chief's Chat the Chief's Chat, which is the Chief Chief, Anthony Sizemore.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:We are glad to have you back. It's been a couple months since we've had you on the Cape Cop Cast and now we're kind of launching something new. We're going to do a weekly show featuring you talking about different initiatives that are going on within the police department, different topics that people within our community need to be aware of, maybe trends we're seeing, any kind of things that we think is pertinent for the community to know.
Speaker 3:I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's going to be great. This was your idea too, and I love it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's why I love it. Now, since the last time I've been here, you're in a new place, which is really cool, and you guys have been crushing it. I'm so proud and I listened to all of them. Thank you.
Speaker 1:That's so nice of you to say. We couldn't do it without the awesome people that are here within the department willing to come on the podcast, so we appreciate them and the stories that they tell and all the hard work that they're doing too. It's been great.
Speaker 2:For this episode. We're going to talk a little bit about this last hurricane season that we've been having. It actually ends on at the end of November, but we've gotten hit pretty hard this season Not as quite as hard as Ian, but it could have been definitely difficult. We've had Helene and we've had Milton. So what are some of the things that you feel like you saw that we've maybe done well, maybe could improve on Sure.
Speaker 3:Well, let's start with the good news.
Speaker 3:The leadership team all the way down to the officers on a all-hands email that this is my fifth actual hurricane activation in my career, going all the way back to Hurricane George, george with an S on the end of it in 1998, all the way through George, charlie, irma, Ian and now Milton Helene was in there, but that wasn't a true activation for us. It skirted our coast. Of the five that I've been affiliated with in different levels of the organization, I think it was the best run operation, and that's not me, that's the team that we put in place and the plan that we have and we call it a plan in a can. You open it up and everybody knows their role, everybody has been trained on it, everybody has the equipment, the resources and they know what to do when we push go and when we pushed go. It went very well. And the repeat experience part is a lot of people were in the same place for the first time in Ian. Same people, same role, very similar rollout here in 2024. And it worked very, very well.
Speaker 1:This was my first activation working for the police department and for me it felt very seamless. I know you worked through, ian too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, and not just the people in place. I think we had the resources in place this time, at least from what I saw Before. We had a lot of intersections and things that were down and we didn't necessarily have a bunch of generators to hook up quickly and get everything back up and running.
Speaker 3:Generators, cones, barricades. The partnerships that we were building on the fly in 2022 were solidified in 2024. So it's very difficult to shake hands and exchange business cards in the middle of a recovery. It's really nice to have those relationships established in blue skies and by having that and drilling and preparing and practicing when we went, much like athletics, if you practice the way you're going to play and when the game comes and you go out and play, it shouldn't be all that different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was definitely again just felt pretty seamless and everyone knew their role. They knew exactly what we were doing. We switched to Alpha Bravo activation and we had kind of an all-hands-on-deck type of situation here within the department. For people who don't know what that is, can you explain that to them, Sure, when I hear you say alpha Bravo, I get like a. I'm getting called to the principal's office.
Speaker 3:Alpha Bravo is a scheduling component that we kick into gear for any type of emergency response. Hurricanes are the most prevalent ones here, but if we had a tornado activation or a tornado touchdown that was major, like we had several years ago, or a man-made disaster or chemical spill or any type of all-hazard hurricanes, like I said, being the most prevalent, we will enact what we call Alpha Bravo Schedule. And that is everybody working. So we work 12-hour shifts on blue skies every day. So in a 24-hour period, on one side of the week you have a 12-hour day shift and then a 12-hour night shift. They work and on their days off another crew comes in and they do 12-hour day shift, 12-hour night shift. So there's four platoons, as we call. They do 12 hour day shift, 12 hour night shift. So there's four platoons, as we call them, with a day shift and night shift on each one. That's how you make up your 24 hour coverage. We're talking about patrol, the, the boots on the ground. When we activate alpha bravo, everybody comes in. Whether it's your scheduled work day or your day off, you're both in. It's your day, it's a Monday, you show up at 0700 or 7 am. The day off crew or the Bravo team comes in as well. So if you work Southwest Precinct at 7 am you show up so you have the regular scheduled programming right. That's your alpha and they handle all the calls for service as if a hurricane or the disaster or the event never happened. You're working, 911 calls, patrol, everything that you would normally do. The Bravo team does all the extra stuff, such as what happens after the hurricane. So I'll back up.
Speaker 3:We initiate Alpha Bravo before landfall to make sure that everybody's in, we're secure, our vehicles are here, we're ready to deploy. So before the storm happens, we've done work, probably a week's worth of real preparation. Then, as winds get to sustained winds of 45 miles an hour, police, fire and EMS will suspend services because it's too dangerous for those vehicles to be out and the calls will begin to stack. But we're sheltered in place for safety. Once those winds go below 45 miles an hour sustained, they still may have some gusty conditions and it can still be dangerous. But if the sustained winds are below that and then public works, we all come together and do what's called first push, and first push goes out and does exactly that. We push things out of the main roadways and do windshield damage assessments, look for surge, look for standing water, look for catastrophic damage, look for intersections that are out or any type of debris or hazard or problem in that first push. So we do the major thoroughfares, then secondary roadways and then down to the local roads and then everybody goes out. And then that's when the Alpha Bravo is really in play, where the Alpha shift or you were here anyway start picking up those 911 calls, those stacked calls for service or any new ones that come in.
Speaker 3:The Bravo shift is going to do whatever we found in that windshield assessment. And that goes on for days. So initially it's intersections, traffic lights out, directing roadways that are closed due to standing water or floods or anything you name it. We're going to respond to it. That's the Bravo and we roll with that. So on your couple of days that you're working, you're the alpha. If you're supposed to be off now, you then switch to the Bravo. So the alpha, whoever's working that day, does all the normal police expected activity and all the other things. And it really evolves. Intersections come online, new things start to develop. Somebody's getting injured, putting down shutters, it doesn't matter what it is, and I can't even imagine all of the scenarios and possibilities, but we'll be there as we've evolved in our response or the scale of the storm.
Speaker 3:If you look at Ian, wide swaths of our north section of the city that aren't on city water and sewer when they lose power, they lose the ability to have water in their homes. So we had a pod or point of distribution. We called them aquapods because people needed water. So we had trucks of water so you could show up with your jug and get water. So that's why I get a little bit of anxiety when you say that, because there's a lot of stuff that goes into Alpha Bravo the thing.
Speaker 3:As a police chief, I know it's uncomfortable doing that. You work I think I worked 21 or 22 straight days after Ian. Fortunately we didn't have to do this with Milton. But it's a taxing thing for your staff because their homes are damaged, their homes don't have power, their families are experiencing all of the things that everybody else is and you're not able to tend to them the way you would like to because you're working every single day or night, depending on where you fall on the schedule for 12 hours and you want me as a human. I want to get them off of Alpha Bravo as soon as we can.
Speaker 3:But after Ian I had a lot of help and I had been the chief for almost two years when Ian hit, but it was the first time I had been the person in charge. I was in command staff for Irma, I was a street cop for Charlie. It's a different perspective when you're there, so I want to take care of my people. The chief of Coral Gables, ed Hudak, called me out of the blue didn't know the number, some 305 number and said hey, this is who I am, let me give you some help. And he sent people and he himself came and kind of helped me see it from a fresh perspective.
Speaker 3:And we have a good network of chiefs in Florida through the Florida Police Chiefs Association. So, ed, a big shout out to him. It was tremendous. And what he told me, that is you really want to get these mutual aid people out of here, because I had 60 cops from the East Coast come over and help and you don't want to accept help. You want to be able to self-sustain and you don't want to accept help. You want to be able to self-sustain and you don't want to burden them. And he goes, they're getting paid just fine. They volunteered to be here. You're not helping them by getting them out of here. Keep them as long as you need them. That was a relief, because that was weighing on my mind.
Speaker 3:I want to get these guys out of here, and that's one of the lessons that we all learned in 2022. That made it so much easier to set expectations for our staff in 2024, what to expect. And you got to keep in mind we're hiring at such a rate. Our patrol bureau, for easy math, is about 100 people. Well, we hire 30-something people a year, so that's 60. Well, we hire 30-something people a year, so that's 60. 60% of our frontline first responding people had never been through a hurricane and that's a lot. There's a lot of elementary education on what to expect. Right, because they're looking to us as leadership. I know I signed up for this, but what am I in for? We are now better positioned to provide them with experienced answers of what you're in for and what worked, what didn't work, in previous storms, so we can apply them to deployments and activations now and into the future. So you know me by now long, rambling answers, but that's what we learned and that's what we were able to put into place for Milton.
Speaker 2:Right. So we were talking a little bit about first push. Where you go out, you kind of assess everything, you see where all the damage lies, and I know, for at least the last couple hurricanes, even Helene wasn't too bad, but somehow the storm surge ended up being pretty bad to the point that there were a lot of roads that we could not get down for calls for service, which is a real issue and one of the things you know sometimes you don't have everything you need. You can't be afraid to say that you need it.
Speaker 3:If you need help, you need to ask for it. If you need equipment, you need to ask for it. That's not the time to have false bravado. We got this. If you need it, ask for it and you'll get it, and you'll be better for it.
Speaker 3:Storm surge and rising water Wow, that's a new one, right, yeah, without giving away too much personal data, I've lived in Florida for 50 years, let's just say that. And storm surge and rising water was never a concern. And, like I said, hurricane Donna in 1960, all the way to Hurricane Charlie in 2004,. A lot of near misses, a lot't have to worry about hurricanes like we do now. Or we were just naive and we certainly didn't worry about surge and rising water. That was always mentioned. But it was a wives tale, right? It just wasn't a thing. And Charlie, we didn't have it.
Speaker 3:Irma, they prepared us for it. It's going to be catastrophic. You better run for the hills, get your family out of here, and a lot of people did that. I believe Irma was the largest full-scale evacuation in Florida's history and everybody left, and I don't think we got a millimeter of surge with Irma and it provided people with a lot of false sense of security. Or the boy who cried wolf, or I'm never doing that again. It was a complete disaster getting out and people couldn't get back. The flights were tough to get back, it was tough to get gas to get home and a lot of people said never again, especially if this is the nonsense that we're going to have. And boy were we wrong.
Speaker 3:And in 2022, obviously, ian had catastrophic flooding 12 feet. We had water in houses in Cape Coral. Three to four feet was about the average, just devastating for people and it scared the life out of a lot of people with rising water. And that's the first time in my life you know, almost half a century of living here that that really came to fruition and that was scary and you can't get to people to help them. And then it doesn't even have to be a named storm or a major, major hurricane. I believe it was on MLK day. Back in January we had one of those hundredyear rainstorms where seven inches of rain in about an hour, hour and a half made so many roads impassable and emergencies don't stop right and the only reason we stop emergency services in a storm is the wind. So if you don't have the wind but you have rising water. You still have people that need help, and if you can't get there, that's a big problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we are definitely working on getting some high water type vehicles, these amphibious vehicles that can be used, because you think about a regular patrol car you even think about. You know some of the folks have the pickup trucks within the department, those types of things, but when we're talking about feet and feet of water that's not going to get through. You can't just take a pickup truck or a Ford Explorer and drive through and expect to get through. We tell people all the time if it's more than a foot of water, don't bother going through it, turn around and you know. So we are seeing this need for these high water vehicles really for the first time.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. It's a reality. It was a luxury, I think, for a lot of people before, or an unnecessary expense, but we really got serious about it when Helene came through and we saw what happened in North Carolina. We saw what happened on the north of us, on the coast in Pinellas County, hernando County, up near Clearwater, that we need to get vehicles to be able to respond. And boy is it going to be tough to get water vehicles now when everybody's got.
Speaker 3:If I've got this idea, a lot of people smarter than me have got this idea too but we've got to Do something. We've got to be able to respond to locations and help our people. There are a few agencies around that are ahead of us in getting that, but they need it for themselves. And to be at the end of a street and see somebody down the road that needs help and then we have to call somebody else to get it, it's just not feasible. Um, unfortunately for us, mother Nature put a real hard timeline on us because, helene, we were thinking about it and what was it? Five minutes later we had Milton bearing down, so we didn't have time to do it. But it proved to be correct here, where we didn't have water intrusion into homes, like we did in Ian, but we had plenty of roads that were totally impassable. There was so much standing water on Cape Coral Parkway in the southeast that we had to shut down the bridge for a little bit of time, but the need to get places is still present.
Speaker 3:We're growing. We're almost a quarter million people here and growing every day. We have got to get the right equipment to keep our residents safe, because there's an expectation that they rightfully have that when they need us, we're going to be able to get there. And if you know or should have known and didn't act that's true in human resources stuff, complaints, protecting people and also acquiring the tools you need we know, scientifically proven, that that has happened here. If it only happens once, it's proof, it's going to continue to happen. Unfortunately and that's not a political statement by me, that's just a meteorological fact that we went from no rising water to we have flooded out impassable roadways on the regular now. So that's the know or should have known. Then what are we doing about it? And we are working to rapidly acquire the necessary equipment, ie high water vehicles, to be able to respond to you when you have an emergency.
Speaker 1:We were looking some of them up. They look pretty cool. They're definitely interesting vehicles and it's true, though I mean another example my parents have lived in the same house on Charlotte Harbor for over 20 years. We went through Hurricane Charlie in that house no issues, no flooding. We went through Irma in that house no issues, no flooding. We went through Ian in that house no issues, no flooding. Helene comes, they got two or three feet of water on their first level. They clean everything up. We were pressure washing down there. We were making it look spotless. Two weeks later, milton comes in five feet of water in the same house. So it's definitely trending in that direction. Now we're seeing, even with these smaller quote unquote storms that aren't hitting us directly, we're dealing with flooding still. So it does make me nervous for the next storm.
Speaker 3:It can be a tropical depression, it could be a low that floats over us up to and including a cat five. The difference in the flooding and the accumulated water really doesn't matter in those storms, it's the speed, the angle. I mean, it's not a weather podcast, but it could be an afternoon rainstorm that could make certain roads impassable here, and the need for us to be there for you just doesn't go away.
Speaker 3:What does change in the number and the category is the wind damage and the Alpha Bravo aspect and the cleanup. But I think it's not really an argument. I think everybody's got affirmative head nods that yeah, we need this. And to those that are wondering, are we prepared to be able to respond to those emergencies yes, and we are becoming better prepared.
Speaker 2:Right, and we've had so many calls for service after every single hurricane. I think we had what over 500 calls for service or welfare checks after Hurricane Ian, and there were a lot of roads that we couldn't get past, usually because of high water and stuff like that. So those are just things to think about. And then we have a growing population in Cape Coral on top of that.
Speaker 3:Everybody needs emergency services. Whether you plan for it or not, you're going to need us, and when you do need us, you're expecting us to be prepared.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. Those vehicles are coming.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:That'll be great. I think that's just another way that we can assure the people that we are looking out for them and keeping them safe 100%. Anything else you want to add? Chief for our inaugural Chiefs Chat.
Speaker 3:No, just looking forward to doing this a little bit more often to go over, I think, some of the highlights of the week, some news stories that we feel are important, some follow-ups on cases that I know have great community interest, and we're looking to hear from you. If you have questions, hey, whatever happened with that, you know, feel free to reach out to us, and if we have information to share, I think this will be the format to do it Just be more transparent, more informative.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yes. If you have any questions or anything, you can email us at capepdpao, at capecoralgov, and we can get those questions answered for you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening. We'll be here on Fridays talking to the chief for chief chat, so see you next time.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
