News Service of Florida — As director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management since April 2021, Kevin Guthrie has run point on disasters from Category 4 hurricanes to a deadly condominium-building collapse in Surfside. Guthrie also has been charged with overseeing the evacuation of Floridians from strife-torn Haiti, along with a controversial program to transport migrants to “sanctuary” areas of the country.
The News Service asked him five questions:
What were your thoughts as AccuWeather recently warned of a busy Atlantic hurricane season, followed by a Colorado State University forecast that the entire list of storm names could be used this year?
Guthrie: It was more confirmation of what our own in-house meteorologists were saying. What’s the horrible and terrible? The horrible and terrible is we get hit with four storms. But at the same time, I cannot worry about how many storms we are going to have. My job is to prep this team to be ready to go for a multiple hurricane season. And that’s what we’re doing, preparing as if we’re going to have the ‘04 season all over again. Figure if we’re ready for that, then we should be good to go. We’re going to make sure that we’re ready with all of our vendors, all of our state emergency-response team members. We want to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
What did you learn from state evacuation efforts last year in Israel that you were able to incorporate into ongoing Haiti evacuation missions?
Guthrie: I’m happy to report we’re at 578 Floridians and Americans repatriated back to the United States. What was the most challenging piece at the very beginning of (Haiti) was, we did not have a cooperating government; Israel wanted us to come in and take Floridians out of the country. So, getting access or permits to get into and land our charter aircraft, that was easy to do when you have a cooperative government. In Haiti, it was much more difficult; the entire government basically collapsed. We were dealing with individuals in control of the airport, giving us permits by the day instead of by the week or maybe two weeks. It was very slow going in the beginning because of the tactics that we were having to use—one carload at a time moving in the dead of night, trying to get people across a mountainous jungle terrain to the airport. One individual said it took him four days to get from Port-au-Prince to the airport. On a normal day, that’s a seven-hour drive.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state defendants last month were dismissed from a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts that challenged Florida’s migrant flights from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022. Where is the “Unauthorized Alien Transport Program” now, and does the dismissal against the governor mean you can start running some flights again?
Guthrie: We were never disallowed to take people in, but in the state statute, it must be voluntary for individuals— unauthorized, undocumented aliens with proper paperwork— and they volunteer to go. We know the No. 1 intended destination for individuals coming out of Haiti, Venezuela, Guatemala, Cuba, is Florida. What’s unfortunate about this situation is trying to find actual volunteers inside the state of Florida that want to relocate to somewhere else. That number is really, really small. We have spent about $700,000 trying to locate people here in the state of Florida that want to relocate. Our product right now has been 10, 12 people, maybe. So we’ve put a pause on that methodology because we don’t want to continue to spend taxpayer dollars to find really small groups of people. We’re reevaluating our next steps to see where we go next. Is it back to the southwest (Texas) border? Is it here in Florida? How do we start to move more people that want to be moved? But even if we’re at the southwest border, it is voluntary to go to the cities that the governor and the staff have identified. So we’ll continue to work on that, but right now we have no flight on the horizon as we try to find volunteers.
How prepared is your agency for the next pandemic?
Guthrie: Right now, we still have three warehouses. The Legislature signed off on a new warehouse that will allow us to collapse those warehouses into one. We have one Lakeland warehouse now completely full of PPE; hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of masks, gloves, goggles, gowns—a PPE stock supply. What’s unfortunate about some of that is it was underneath a temporary (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) approval. If the Biden administration lets that temporary FDA approval go, then all of that equipment is for naught. But we don’t see anything on the horizon where the FDA is going to let what they call the emergency-use authority go. So as long as that emergency-use authority stays intact, we’ll be OK to respond to the next pandemic.
Have you decided how long you can keep running the agency?
Guthrie: I told my staff I’m guaranteed two years and six months with the (DeSantis) administration. I like to think that the job we’re is good and I’ll be looked at by the next administration on my own merits.
