Floriduh Legislator Wants To Lengthen Evacuation Time For Keys. Why? For More Development, Silly!!

The Florida Keys have been battered by hurricanes, flooded by sea level rise and is gentrifying quickly. But one state lawmaker from Naples wants to add thousands more homes to the island chain, a place many local leaders believe is already built to capacity. An amendment slipped into a house bill this week seeks to extend the hurricane evacuation time on the archipelago from 24 hours to 30 hours — a move that would effectively bump up the amount of development allowed in the Keys.

Emergency managers, environmentalists and a key Monroe County lawmaker called it irresponsible to cram more people and homes in an area where tidal flooding already lasts for months in some pockets and is expected to become worse and more frequent in the future. “This is foolishness,” said Craig Fugate, Florida’s former director of emergency management and head of FEMA under President Barack Obama. “First of all, 24 hours is a fantasy anyway. That means everything works, nothing breaks, there’s no crashes and everyone leaves when they’re supposed to.”

Hurricane Irma in 2017, for instance, left evacuating Keys residents stuck in hours of traffic on the sole two lane highway connection Key West to the Florida mainland. On the way back, many found themselves stranded in Florida City and Homestead for days. The Category 4 storm also destroyed much of what passed for affordable housing in the region — mobile homes and downstairs enclosures located in flood-prone areas.

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State Rep. Rob Rommel, R-Naples, chair of the Civil Justice Subcommittee, filed the amendment for an extended evacuation window on Wednesday. The evacuation time, which is tied to the number of buildings in the county, has been 24 hours for decades because it’s based on U.S. Census data, and the Keys’ population has long hovered between 70,000 and 80,000 people. A 2018 University of Florida study suggests that about 4 percent of the Keys population, mostly lower-income people who lost their housing, left after Irma, which if true would bring the population to just under 74,000 people. The legislation could potentially unleash a development boom in the Keys, which many say doesn’t have the land or infrastructure to support. More development would make safe evacuation ahead of large hurricanes more difficult, critics of the amendment say.

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https://news.wjct.org/post/forget-hurricanes-and-sea-rise-bill-could-lead-building-boom-keys