Our entire staff here hope that you and your families and colleagues have come through Milton okay. None of the SBEP staff have power at their houses – which is not surprising, as, for example, more than 80% of Manatee County is without power this morning, according to the Bradenton Herald. My house didn’t flood, but m AC unit was blown off its stand. If you’ve ever tried to move one, you’ll know that a home AC condenser is not exactly lightweight. Oh well, the roof is intact, at least, and flood waters stayed out of our house.

While the obvious focus the next few days is to protect human lives, and to get the debris cleared out and the power back on, I don’t want the SBEP to sit around working remotely on reports and such as if nothing has happened here. Instead, we’ve been in more or less constant contact the last two days talking about how to respond to what we just came through. I’ve also been in contact with Dr. Christine Angelini, who is the Director of the UF Center for Coastal Studies, and Dr. Mark Rains, who was appointed to the position of the state’s Chief Science Officer by Governor DeSantis.

Our general thoughts are that we should respond in terms of short-term, medium-term, and long-term strategies. We don’t have all of this worked out, but here are some general thoughts on how we might proceed.