Hurricane Ian Pre-Landfall in Florida

With Hurricane Ian setting up to have a major impact on the central Gulf Coast of Florida, the Disaster Podcast team got together to talk about potential impacts and preparedness efforts. We were lucky to get disaster and emergency management meteorologist, Melissa Sizemore to come on this episode to share her broad expertise in weather, disaster messaging, and public information.

Also on the show was security consultant Michael Berryhill. Michael is a member of the Disaster Podcast community on Facebook. He currently lives in the Nashville area but had previous lived in the Tampa area and shares not only his security expertise but also his personal experiences with storm in the past. He mentions the issues faced by parents with children who have special needs and mental health challenges. We touched on this in a recent episode earlier in September on Mental Health Challenges for Disaster Victims.

Dr. Joe Holley comes on to share his knowledge of the Federal efforts to prepare for Ian’s impact. The FEMA IST (Incident Support Team) was moved from Puerto Rico where it had been supporting response efforts there following impacts from Hurricane Fiona. It is now standing by to assist Florida state and local teams and is staging in the Atlanta area at last report.

This episode is hosted by Jamie Davis and Sam Bradley.

Paragon Brings “The Experience”

Paragon Medical Education Group specializes in bringing what they call “The Experience” to jurisdictions around the country. They bring together police, fire, EMS, and hospital teams to train together and learn what to expect from each diverse group in the response team so that each knows what to expect from the other and how to back the other groups up. Visit Paragon’s site at ParagonMedicalGroup.com for more information on how this can be brought into your system.