Leveraging Known Impacts to Florida's Citrus Industry from Historical Hurricane and Hard-Freeze Events to Enhance Future Public Safety Messages

Florida’s Citrus Belt supplies nearly half of all citrus production in the United States. Over the past 100 years, this area has experienced extreme tropical cyclone and hard freeze events which resulted in catastrophic long-term impacts to the citrus industry. The Citrus Belt is located within the state’s peninsula and is vulnerable to tropical storms and hurricanes capable of delivering long durations of damaging winds arriving from the south, and periodic cold air outbreaks which can deliver long durations of sub-freezing temperatures arriving from the north. A section of the Citrus Belt known as the Indian River District lies almost entirely within the area of responsibility of the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Melbourne, Florida.

Local meteorologists must find ways to enhance public messaging by expressing the threat in relatable terms during “once in a generation” events, but without falling subject to the pitfalls of using such analogs. The NWS Melbourne faced this challenge in 2016 when Hurricane Matthew (Category 4) threatened after an 11-year drought of no major hurricane wind impacts. More so, December 2019 will be the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Christmas Freeze - the last major freeze to widely impact the state. This presentation explores potential improvements to public safety messaging to protect life and property during related extreme events by considering human factors as connected to known impacts to local economies (such as the citrus industry). In extreme events, sectors of a community’s infrastructure can collapse where resiliency might be measured by the subsequent effect on the local economy itself. This work builds upon an initial study (Ferrarezi et al. 2019) which identified the constraining effects imposed when combining these two disaster types as compared with known periods of decline in citrus production. Recent Hurricane Irma (2017; Category 4) refreshed everyone’s understanding to the devastation a major hurricane could unleash upon people, community infrastructure, and local economies. In contrast, many Floridians have likely forgotten the 1989 Freeze resulted in at least 26 fatalities and hundreds of millions of dollars of economic damage. Examples will be shown that leverage known impacts to Florida’s citrus industry in order to calibrate message effectiveness during such future events.