Sheriff’s Office team answers call for Panhandle assistance

The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office is heeding the call for help in the Hurricane Michael disaster zone along the Florida Panhandle. A team of 11 personnel left late last week to relieve the Santa Rosa Sheriff’s Office, which as helping patrol Bay County.

“Those deputies are becoming very exhausted,” St. Lucie Sheriff Ken Mascara said of the first wave of assistance. Larger agencies were tapped first to help with recovery and public safety. Now, it’s St. Lucie’s turn.

Broward, Palm Beach and Orange counties all responded when St. Lucie needed help in the wake of the 2004 storms, hurricanes Frances and Jeanne. “We’ve got to pay it forward,” Sheriff Mascara said of assisting fellow law enforcement agencies.

Sheriff Mascara and his leadership team hand-picked nine deputies and two supervisors to assist in Bay County. The deputies come from throughout the agency, leaving no one division unmanned.

“I can assure the public, deputies are in the communities and have a presence,” Sheriff Mascara said. No “frontline” deputies were tapped to travel to the Panhandle. Staffing there is “still up to par.”

However, response times might lag a bit within the specialty units, including the Special Investigations and Traffic divisions.

The St. Lucie team will be tasked with patrolling the community from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., according to Mascara. At this stage of the recovery efforts, missions for assisting agencies are becoming more designed and more specific in nature.

Two of the men deployed to the Panhandle had been sent previously to hurricane-damaged areas of Louisiana and Mississippi. They will be a “great asset” to the team given their prior experience, the sheriff said.

The team will be living in tents on the grounds of the Bay County jail because there are no other accommodations available. Sheriff Mascara said the team was told they could expect to be in Bay County for at least seven days.

In the meantime, the St. Lucie team has two satellite phones with which to communicate, as well as several old flip-style cellphones that can reach the AT&T cell tower locally. Sheriff Mascara said the phones were in the Sheriff’s Office inventory and have once again been pressed into service.

The team contacted Mascara the morning of Friday, Oct. 19, to inform him they had arrived in Bay County. They told him that photos of the destruction left in Hurricane Michael’s wake simply do not do it justice – it is so much worse.

Hurricane Michael struck the Panhandle near Mexico Beach on Oct. 10, and is blamed for the deaths of at least 50 people, including 35 in the U.S. Many of the deaths have been attributed to falling trees and flash flooding.

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