OHIO — Ohio Task Force 1 is on the ground in Florida, but on Thursday morning, Program Manager Evan Schumann got a call that said they needed more team members to help.
“FEMA called me and said we want to make your type three 47 person team into a type 1, 82 person team. So we reached out to the rest of the team members and put together the 35 additional team members that we had to deploy,” he said.
Prior to this, there were only 47 members deployed to help with the storm. Schumann explained the original plan.
“They were staged in Alabama and then moved over to Georgia, and then this morning, they moved all the way down into the impact area in Florida,” he said.
He said he believes FEMA called in extra help due to the immense impact Hurricane Ian had on Florida.
“So now they’re trying to get enough resources down there to ensure that they can do a quality search and rescue needs,” he said.
Schumann is not exactly sure what the team is doing in Florida because it’s very hard to stay in contact with them when they’re in the impact zone of the storm.
“They’re down in the heavily-impacted areas so the cellular services are very, very random for us to be able to get ahold of them or them to call us. In addition, it seems like there’s a lot of people down there of course now engaged in search and rescue operations and other things, and they’re having to use satellite devices, so that too is causing us some issue to be able to talk with them. So I can’t really tell you what they’ve done today or what they’re doing at the moment,” he said.
Schumann has hopes to hear from his team soon and knows that they are down there helping the people of Florida.
Hurricane Ian entered the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday after ripping through Florida as a tropical storm. But it strengthened back up into a Category 1, and it’s expected to hit South Carolina on Friday.
