How Ready Are We?

1 Insurance infrastructure. The state insurance system, like the Miami Dolphins, is in a rebuilding year. The state's hurricane catastrophe fund, a post-Andrew backstop to keep insurers, started the 2004 season with $6 billion on hand. It now has approximately $3 billion. Insurers wish it had less. They didn't anticipate being unable to cumulatively draw it down from multiple storms. Citizens Property Insurance, the state-run insurer of last resort, started 2004 with $1.3 billion and ended with a $515.5-million deficit. And Citizens' operational flaws were revealed -- an overreliance on independent adjusters, for one. The problem is being fixed, the state says. The good news: Only one small insurer failed, but that's only because a few parent companies propped up their cash-strapped Florida subsidiaries.

2 FEMA. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had its act together last summer in delivering relief supplies but has drawn plenty of ire from some county officials for what they see as unnecessary red tape and delays for things like reimbursing for debris removal. FEMA also didn't help its image by making questionable aid payments in Miami-Dade and by hiring people with unsavory pasts as claim inspectors. FEMA says it is negotiating with inspection companies to better train claim inspectors and says it will work with the state to better educate local officials on how to properly fill out reimbursement paperwork. Agency spokespeople say FEMA plans no real policy changes entering the 2005 storm season.

3 Local emergency response. Florida local officials should know what holes to plug this season. In St. Lucie County, county administrator Doug Anderson says Hurricane Frances knocked out cell phone service, and the county has invested in 800 mhz radios at $1,000 each. At the county's civic center, Anderson has stockpiled ready-to-eat meals, tarps, drinking water, insect spray and window cleaner. Anderson says he's learned that every community is on its own in the first days after a storm while state and federal relief gears up. "Should we ever be put in that situation again or another community, at least I have it," Anderson says of his stockpile. "We were out of everything, and nothing was coming in." New development has only added to the complexity of hurricane planning, however: Hurricane center director Max Mayfield watches the state's condo construction boom with misgiving. "We can't evacuate people efficiently now," he says. "It's not just Miami-Dade County. It's other places too."

4 Big businesses. What's true for governmental planners is true for business. After 2004, the state's larger businesses know the drill. SunTrust, for instance, had after-action reviews covering a slew of topics from how to transfer safe deposit boxes from inoperable branches to whether to halt mailed marketing items. (Lesson 1: People have their minds elsewhere at storm time.) With 132 stores in Florida, Home Depot learned lessons both large -- how many loaded trucks can be stored in the Orlando Convention Center awaiting the all-clear to proceed to ravaged areas (120), for example -- and small: The effectiveness of setting up a circus tent on the Vero store parking lot to handle sales at a damaged store. Home Depot senior managers alone have held at least a dozen meetings to plot out this year's contingency plans, from staging strategies for resupply trucks to the management of its "war room" in Atlanta.

5 Small businesses. The biggest lessons small-business people hurt by the 2004 hurricanes learned were the importance of backing up computers and records and having adequate insurance. (For tips on how to prepare, see FloridaSmallBusiness.com.)

6 Homes/building codes. Changes in the Florida Building Code come painfully slow, with the next round scheduled for 2006. Clearly, some designs didn't account sufficiently for the ways wind-driven rain can penetrate attic vents and openings, and the damage in Orlando and the Panhandle raises questions about whether the stronger coastal code requirements should be extended inland. Nothing done to the code, however, addresses the substantial problem that at least 7.3 million Florida homes predate it.

7 State's economy. With close to 1,000 people a day still moving to Florida and tourism growing, it's tough to make a case that last summer's storms did anything to deter growth. Essentially, Florida's economy took some stiff blows from the wind last year and shrugged. Unemployment went from 4.9% in August to 4.8% in September and 4.7% in October before subsiding -- to a low of 4.4% in March. Private-sector employment has increased by 191,000 jobs since last June. Consumer confidence also was unaffected. "Not to make light of Punta Gorda and Pensacola, you're just not looking at huge damage in heavily populated areas like Andrew was," says Chris McCarty of the University of Florida Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

8 Recovery from last year. The universal response in hurricane-whipped areas is that rebuilding happens only just so fast. The odds of any given area in the state getting hit in any given year are low, so perhaps 2004 wasn't a set-up punch. Then again, storm frequency runs in decades-long cycles, and the cycle has gone to the plentiful-storm side. Is the glass half-full, half-empty or about to get blown off the table?

Tags: Around Florida