FSU drone team, FAMU faculty assist with Hurricane Ian search and rescue efforts

From search and rescue efforts to mental wellness for first responders, Florida State University’s drone team and Florida A&M University’s faculty are doing their part in helping southwest Florida during Hurricane Ian's disastrous aftermath. 

FSU’s Center for Disaster Risk Policy drone team was on standby at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando Wednesday before being dispatched to Cape Coral and then to Naples Thursday. 

The team is controlling remotely piloted aircraft that fly over areas impacted by Hurricane Ian’s category 4 landfall for urban search and rescue purposes. 

“Drones are going out ahead of the search and rescue teams to provide information about where the damage is the worst, which helps decision makers decide how to pass on resources and what goes where,” Center for Disaster Risk Policy Director David Merrick told the Democrat Thursday evening while in Naples.

More on Hurricane Ian:

• 'Help is on the way': Volunteers, first responders from Tallahassee aid in aftermath of Ian
• 'No idea what we're going back to': Hurricane Ian evacuees, utility crews wait in Tallahassee
• 'If the sea became a desert': Ian causes 'reverse storm surge' in St. Marks, Tampa Bay

Merrick has been the director of the center for more than five years, during which he and his team have helped with efforts concerning the Champlain Towers collapse in Surfside, Florida in 2021, Hurricane Ida in Louisiana in 2021, Hurricane Michael in the Florida Panhandle in 2018 and Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017.

The drone team is made up of seven members, which includes four students: one undergraduate, two master’s students and Laura Hart, a 28-year-old doctoral student studying public policy from Pensacola, Florida.

“There’s a lot of devastation and a lot of catastrophic damage,” Hart said, "but it’s really great to see communities pulling together, and it feels really great to be able to help in a small, small, way.”

‘A whole lot of people stayed home’

Given all the experience that the drone team has had while assisting with previous natural disasters, one thing Merrick notes with Hurricane Ian is the outlook of evacuations. 

Governor Ron DeSantis issued mandatory evacuation orders Tuesday for about a dozen counties in central and south Florida, where at least 2.5 million people reside, but many decided not to leave. 

“One of the biggest differences that we’ve seen here is that for some reason, I don’t think we had as many people evacuating as we’d normally like to see in an event like this,” Merrick said. “A whole lot of people stayed home who may have been better off going somewhere else.”

While the drone team expects to be deployed in southwest Florida for a week or less, it works through challenges such as coordination and figuring out where resources should be brought to meet the needs of victims as quickly as possible. 

“Emergency management is a public service, and it’s what we do,” Merrick said. “It’s gratifying to be able to put all the things we talk about to work in the field.”

FAMU faculty member supports first responders’ mental wellness 

On top of the efforts of FSU’s drone team, Kellie O’Dare, a FAMU assistant professor in the Institute of Public Health, has also made her way down to southwest Florida with the Tallahassee Fire Department’s Urban Search and Rescue Team and Peer Support Team. 

With O’Dare also being the director of the 2nd Alarm Project, which is a grant initiative through FAMU that primarily works with the Tallahassee Fire Department, she will be assisting first responders with their mental wellness as they work throughout the affected areas.

"We're headed down there as we oftentimes get deployed with first responders to these types of incidents,” O’Dare told the Democrat Thursday afternoon as she traveled to Orlando. “Whenever there's a critical incident that involves first responders responding, we go to ensure that their emotional and psychological needs are taken care of.” 

Similar to FSU’s drone team, O’Dare has worked at the Surfside building collapse that occurred last year to provide mental health services to first responders. She also assisted them at Bay County to help them navigate their mental health while they dealt with recent wildfires in Florida's Panhandle.

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O’Dare and the fire department teams are staged in Orlando before dispersing to disaster zones that include Lee County, where Fort Myers is one of the cities that has been hit the hardest by the hurricane.

The deployments of the first responders typically last 10 to 20 days during the search and rescue process, with their tasks being highly demanding and highly stressful, O’Dare says.

But she looks forward to the team getting the job done despitethe dangerous conditions that the storm left behind. 

“We have high hopes that they're going to be able to rescue people and reunite them with their families and with their loved ones, and we will be supporting them during their efforts by making sure they have all their needs met,” O’Dare said.

Contact Tarah Jean at tjean@tallahassee.com or follow her on twitter @tarahjean_. 

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