By Casey Lucius, Assistant City Manager, Marco Island
On September 28, 2022, Hurricane Ian hit the west coast of Florida as a Category 4 hurricane and continued to cut across the State of Florida and impact Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Ian was the deadliest hurricane to hit Florida since 1935 with at least 157 fatalities. Some parts of Florida experienced over 10 feet of storm surge. We have all seen the heartbreaking images of the destruction on Sanibel Island, Fort Myers Beach, and in the City of Naples. Marco Island is located just south of Naples and we experienced 8 feet of storm surge and had 304 residential buildings and 63 commercial buildings with significant damage. While Marco Island was not impacted as severely as some other communities, Ian was a major event for the city and we are now working through the lessons learned and the improvement process as we prepare for the 2023 hurricane season.
Like most cities in Florida, we activated our Emergency Operations Center and had our “essential” employees assigned to work in preparation for the hurricane and in the immediate aftermath. In the weeks following the hurricane after the roads were cleared, traffic signals repaired, power restored, and the Island mostly cleaned up, we began the After-Action process. Of course by this time, most of our employees were exhausted and everyone had opinions about what had gone well and what hadn’t gone well. In March of 2022, the City of Marco Island conducted a citizen survey, which was a smooth and insightful process. I reached out to the same contractor after Hurricane Ian and asked about doing an action-after survey for our employees in order to capture their experiences before, during and after the hurricane so we could use their feedback to develop an improvement plan that would be incorporated into a final after-action report.
The employee survey was developed two and a half weeks after the hurricane. We sent the survey link to our employees on October 18th and the results were compiled and accessible through an online dashboard by October 28th. The survey process was remarkable, but unfortunately the results were not.
Here is a snapshot of some of the survey results from Marco Island city employees:
The initial questions in the survey allowed us to see how our employees were personally impacted and how much strain or stress they felt as a result of Hurricane Ian. As we know, an employee who is worried about their home or their family will have a difficult time focusing on the job. We needed to keep this in mind as we continued with recovery efforts and make sure that future planning included sufficient time off to address the personal impacts of a storm.
Asking employees how the management team did in communicating with them before the hurricane revealed that communication before a major incident is extremely important for employees, but clearly, we did not meet their expectations. We improved in our communication after the incident, but our focus was on communicating with citizens and we missed the mark with our employees.
The survey results dig in further to help us understand how we can better support our employees in the future. Scheduling and feeding the employees turned out to be highly important, but we did a poor job in this area. Many of our employees were on stand-by waiting for the storm to pass and they did not necessarily know when they would start work, where they would sleep on site, or where their next meal was coming from. This reminds me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – people need to have their basic needs met and feel safe before they can move to the next level of productivity. Providing for sleeping quarters, food, and making sure everyone had a clear work schedule would have alleviated much stress and frustration for our staff.
Finally, the results of the survey showed that when it came to getting the work done, such as debris pick up, welfare checks, water services, and cleaning the waterways, we performed well as a city team. While we did not conduct an Island-wide citizen survey after the hurricane, we did hear from many residents in the aftermath, and we learned quickly that debris collection and internet restoration were their top priorities.
Getting this structured feedback from our employees has been invaluable. The results are not what we hoped they would be, but the results direct our leadership team to take a hard look at our hurricane planning process and our communication strategies. Our final after-action report will include an improvement plan that outlines specific actions, a person responsible for each action step and a timeline for follow up. We now know what items to include in the improvement plan, and our employees know that their input has been heard.
The city’s leadership team have had two after-action meetings already and more are scheduled and will continue to be scheduled for several months. I recommend doing an employee survey for any cities that are working on their own after-action plan following Hurricane Ian, or for those that may go through a future crisis. We know how important our employees are and we couldn’t plan, respond, or recover from any crisis without their commitment and hard work.
Casey Lucius, Ph.D.
Assistant City Manager
City of Marco Island
50 Bald Eagle Drive
Marco Island, FL 34145
clucius@cityofmarcoisland.com
