Irma: Up-Close & Personal
Hurricane Irma was a monster storm causing a still untold amount of damage as it ripped through the state of Florida this weekend. FOX News Radio reporters Eben Brown and Jeff Monosso were on the ground as the deadly storm made landfall.
BROWN “The first thing is, don’t be a hero. You can’t report the news if you’re injured or even worse, so do try to keep yourself safe. Stock up on supplies. Be prepared to be on your own for a day or two if necessary. You may not have the comforts of the hotel, if you’re lucky you do. But you may not have those kinds of comforts. Be prepared to just sort of be able to camp out on your own if you need to. And the other thing I would tell journalists is that the story of any natural disaster, whether it’s a hurricane or an earthquake or a monsoon on the other part of the planet or a tornado or whatever. You know the event itself can be dramatic, there can be high winds and horrific rain or storm surge or there could be molten lava from volcano, whatever. That stuff is very dramatic and makes very good ‘spot news’ as we call it. But the real story about these things is what happens afterwards. And I can tell you what will happen afterwards in the state of Florida and essentially, the entire state of Florida was affected by this hurricane because it was so large. You have a lot of local businesses who may not have had business interruption insurance. They may not have had the proper insurance in their equipment and they may not be able to open up. And if they don’t open up in a few days, they’re going to lose money and the owner’s going to have to shut them down because he’s not going to be able to maintain the operation. He’s going to have to put a few people out of work. If that’s happening to him, it’s happening to the next business over and the next business and the next business. Before you know it, you’ll have tens of thousands, if not 100,000 people out of work. This becomes an economic nightmare for a community and in this case for a state, you could see those numbers be very much higher. What we have to be mindful of is that in a couple of days when the wind is totally gone and the storm surge recedes, this really isn’t over and it won’t be over. It takes years to rebuild for this from these things. From the very personal stories of repairing and rebuilding one’s home, fighting with their insurance company, trying to get their FEMA benefit to extend just a little bit longer until the home is finished. All the way to the macro-level where large towns may face large quantities of unemployed persons and that wreaks havoc throughout a community and even beyond because of the tax effects. If someone is out of work and they can’t afford their property tax and then the next guy has the same issue. The lack of property tax collections leads the local town to not be able to perform its services and so on and so forth. So you run the risk of bad economies, possibly leading towards recession at least in a certain area. And we have to remember that these people who are victimized will endure this for a number of years to come.”
