In the wake of the Keys’ having been spared the loss of life and property visited on our Florida neighbors by hurricanes Helene and Milton, it’s timely and sobering to choose to avoid the disaster within our control.

Had either of those two massive hurricanes taken slightly different paths, we could have been ordered to evacuate, with not enough time to do so. The previously rare phenomenon of hurricane rapid intensification (RI) is now commonplace, and both Helene and Milton were RI storms. Why does this matter? Evacuation orders are issued by elected officials, with input from professional weather forecasters, but also the commercial interests for whom those orders are costly. When storms go from small to huge in a short time (Milton went from being a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane in about 24 hours), the obsolete assumption that tourists could be ordered to leave 48 hours and residents 24 hours before arrival of a deadly storm risks our lives. Hyperbole? Nope. Delayed evacuation orders in Lee County ahead of Hurricane Ian contributed to the deaths of 67 people in 2022.  

We can’t change the path of the storms that will arrive this year or in the years to come, and it will take decades to reverse the changes in our climate that drive the frequency of RI storms. But we can act now to make ourselves safer.

The Monroe Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) has all but guaranteed that they’ll grant thousands more residential building permits (called ROGOs) to swell the Keys population even further beyond the number that could be evacuated safely. Florida’s own model may not say that we have already exceeded capacity, but common sense says that we can’t evacuate during those now obsolete 48 and 24-hour advance warning windows. It’s really simple: we have too many people and not enough road capacity for safe evacuation now, and adding to the population increases the danger. But bowing to deep-pocketed developers and commercial interests, county leaders are planning to rely on flawed surveys, tweaked technical definitions, and inflated estimates of so-called ‘takings’ liability exposure to justify growing the population of the Keys. They’ve already ignored a study of U.S. 1 traffic that received a failing grade.

This is a complex issue with many moving parts, making it easy to blur the simple fact that our leaders are willing to risk the lives of you and your neighbors by their actions.

We must be in the room where it happens. On Wednesday, October 16th, the next in a series of public hearings will be held at the Marathon Government Center beginning at 9:00 a.m. (with the discussion on ROGOs expected to start at 10 a.m.). We’re mobilizing you and our neighbors to deliver the simple message to the BOCC that population growth in the Keys risks our lives. For more information on the meeting, please visit https://www.monroecounty-fl.gov/Calendar.aspx?EID=10059&month=10&year=2024&day=16&calType=0.

To learn more about the Florida Keys ROGO Coalition that has united 19 community organizations to oppose the irresponsible decision our leaders are poised to deliver, please visit https://www.keyslaststand.org/fkrc. To sign our petition, go to: https://www.change.org/p/the-first-responsibility-of-government-is-to-protect-the-lives-well-being-of-the-people?recruiter=1352347174&recruited_by_id=71590ea0-7cc8-11ef-ba50-79149c5fe0ee&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_content=cl_sharecopy_490226680_en-US%3A8.