DON’T GET SWEPT AWAY
Waiting on standby for hours with his crew of nine handpicked men next to the runway at NAS Jacksonville, Capt. Robert Graff of Florida Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 8 (FL USAR TF-8) finally got the phone call he’d been waiting for. Hurricane Irma had just made landfall in the Florida Keys as a Category 4 with wind gusts up to 130 mph. Communications with the area were almost non-existent, and rumors were everywhere that Key West was destroyed and bodies were floating in the streets.
Speculation aside, Graff knew at least three things to be true. First, that the large, federal FEMA rescue teams were still gearing up and re-staging since the projected landfall location had changed so many times. If help were to arrive immediately, it wouldn’t come from that direction. Second, the bridges between the islands had been damaged, so travel by road wasn’t an option. Last, because of the storm’s current path running up the center of Florida, all of the other state search-and-rescue resources were on standby to see if they would need to rescue their own hometowns.
After days of hearing maybe, possibly, and probably from the Tallahassee Emergency Operations Center, the endless circles of comms had finally boiled down to one phone call and one question. A Coast Guard C-130 was
