Hurricane hindsight: … better planning for '05; If anyone still thinks that preparing a boat for a hurricane simply means tossing out a couple of fenders and putting on extra docklines, they need only take a lesson from the 2004 season in which residents of the eastern seaboard, Gulf coast and Caribbean suffered massive losses from back-to-back hurricanes

Boat/US Magazine, July, 2005 by Elaine Dickinson

Now, nearly a year after Alex, Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne set records, some waterways are still marred by wreckage, a constant reminder of the power that nature holds over us.

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If any good has emerged from the 2004 hurricane season, it's seen in the efforts of the marine community to work on better plans for handling hurricanes--both before and after they hit. At the state and county level, boat owners, marina owners, insurers and government officials are now talking to each other with a new sense of urgency. With the 2005 hurricane season already here, it's not a question of if another hurricane will come, but when. Survival instincts have kicked in and the marine community is rapidly evolving to deal with hurricanes rather than face extinction.

"We got a huge wake-up call last year," said David Roach, executive director of the Florida Inland Navigation District, a state agency responsible for 400 miles of the Intracoastal Waterway. "We just got too complacent. It had been 25 years since Palm Beach County took a direct hit and we sat there and watched these hurricanes form and head into the Gulf or up to the Carolinas. With Frances we finally realized: this one's not going to turn."

The '04 onslaught and its $500 million in losses to recreational boats have finally pushed to the forefront a host of pre- and post-hurricane issues that were never tackled in earnest--until now.

Roach and his agency helped organize a hurricane conference with the Marine Industries Association of Palm Beach County that drew over 80 participants to begin the hard work of bringing together all the disparate marine interests. Although this conference, sponsored in part by BoatU.S., was held in Palm Beach County, the goal is a comprehensive maritime hurricane preparedness plan that can be used or adapted elsewhere. "The lessons we learned here and the plan we are preparing can be applied in coastal regions all along the East Coast," Roach added.

Some 70 hurricane boating issues were identified that need attention and while they had not been prioritized by presstime, the major concerns include:

* Lack of enough protected waters for boat evacuation;

* Lack of enough upland storage land for boats removed from slips;

* Lack of education of boat owners on proper boat preparation;

* Too few marinas with hurricane plans;

* Too few municipalities with hurricane plans for the marine community;

"Cities all over Florida had great hurricane plans for the upland property," said Roach. "But few cities had anything in place for boats. They felt the marine industry would take care of itself, but it's not solely a marine industry issue as we have now found out."

For example, in Palm Beach County alone, about 500 vessels sank in local waters; 340 have been salvaged. That has left 160 boats, unclaimed, most likely uninsured and now derelict, that the county will have to deal with, Roach said. "We had our heads in the sand. Local governments need to be prepared and take on part of this work."

A couple of interesting ideas that were discussed included using state or local parks as boat storage yards. When a hurricane is imminent, the parks are going to be closed anyway and not likely to reopen until conditions are cleaned up, so park usage by the public should not be impacted. Another idea was constructing a heavy-duty mooring cable along the ICW that could be raised for boats to tie on to during a hurricane but remain submerged when not in use.

Another option for safer hurricane storage that is already being tried out is a built-in "hurricane hole" constructed as an integral part of a new marina development near Stuart, FL. The newly opened River Forest Yachting Center was conceived by its developer as a safe storage yard 13 miles inland from the Atlantic with a built-in protected channel 700 feet long. The channel leads to the St. Lucie Channel which links the ocean to Lake Okeechobee. A boat storage building can hold 60 boats and the nine-acre property has land storage for 300 vessels; the canal into the property offers protected tie-ups along the seawall to transient vessels.

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Developer Joe Charles of Illinois, an avid boater himself who had trouble finding a storage site in Florida to leave his boat last summer, will also offer boat owners a "hurricane club" that guarantees either wet or dry storage, including tie-downs for all boats stored on land prior to a storm. Annual fees for the club will range from $1,000 to $5,000 depending on boat size.

River Forest Yachting Center's hurricane club storage concept follows a successful model used at some marinas last year. Boat owners in hurricane prone states are likely to see variations of these clubs popping up in their slip contracts in the future--most likely no longer an option but a requirement.

The BoatU.S. Catastrophe Team that assisted boat owners insured with BoatU.S. through four hurricanes in Florida last year got a ground-zero look at what worked best.

Cat Team members reported that marinas such as Sebastian River Marina that removed most of their customers' boats from the water and secured them with tie-downs imbedded in the concrete yard had a vastly better survival rate than boats left in slips. The testimonials to this well planned system have poured in as the boats tied down on land emerged from hurricanes Frances and Jeanne without a scratch. The Hinckley Yacht Services yard in Stuart, FL, used a similar system for 178 boats and only five boats in two hurricanes blew over, mainly because the ground became saturated.