CONWAY, SC (WBTW) – Hurricane Florence has put new pressure on a $26 million project in Horry County that could impact future response to major disasters.
Since Hurricane Bonnie in 1999, Horry County has used a portion of the M.L. Brown Public Safety Building in Conway for its emergency operations center. It has activated nearly two dozen times, and new concerns have emerged about its actual strength.
“We recently did find out this building was limited to 100 miles per hour for wind, which was about less than a month before Hurricane Florence became an issue,” Webster said.
Webster says the discovery was made after the county began to more diligently research the limitations of the building, as it considered a multi-million dollar project to build a new EOC. M.L. Brown was not designed nor built to withstand the impacts of a major disaster – like a hurricane or earthquake.
“I was led to believe for years that retrofits had been done on this building,” Webster said.
The strength of M.L. Brown is just another strike against the building never intended to house an EOC in the first place. News13 discovered pages of issues and limitations noted in county after-action reports dating back to the late 1990s.
“Flooding is a huge issue here. We’re trapped. The building does not have space for us to actually work in here with all of the pieces and parts we need for an EOC. Self-sustainment for itself on its own. Meeting space is not available. This room becomes very crowded,” Webster described. “This is a 24-hour operation, so there’s no place to sleep, no place to get away from here. When you’re working 24-hour shifts, we have to sustain close to 80 to 100 people in this building. There’s no place to prepare (food). So many different things to have a very functioning EOC, this facility does not do. However, with that said, we make it work and we have made it work for a number of years.”
During Florence, not only did the county see many of these issues come to light again, but power issues and a possible evacuation were also of concern.
However, Hurricane Florence almost put Horry County in unchartered territory.
For the first time in years, the county was at one point almost the bullseye for a major hurricane. Webster says there’s no way the EOC could’ve functioned in M.L. Brown if that worst-case scenario had played out and Florence would’ve have weakened. If it did, though, the county would’ve needed somewhere to do its catastrophic planning. Webster says a part of only one county building would’ve worked – inside 103 Elm Street.
“The building that we were looking at – that’s currently still our alternate site – was the original EOC for the county that was built in the Cold War era,” he explained. “The internal core of the building, where that room is, is the only area hardened. Concrete hardened. It was built to withstand the standards of those days, but it was the best that we have. (But) There’s very little space. We do have some phones (and) we do have some computers, but we can’t move this operation to that location and continue on with what we have now. It quickly became a non-option.”
Horry County previously discussed the idea of building a new EOC in 2011 and 2012, but Horry County leaders say the issue was always money.
Webster says the EOC saw its limitations through the Thousand Year Flood and Hurricane Matthew – but now Hurricane Florence has become the example of why, he says, the county needs a new EOC it can depend on. He says county leaders are understanding the need, too.
“We need the public to understand that we need to be there for them when these things happen,” he says. “It’s easy to look at a building. I’ve had people look at me and say $26 million is a lot of dollars for a building. Yes, it is. It’s a lot, but for the type of building we need, the constant threat we have on the coastal county – not just from hurricanes, but for tornadoes and earthquakes. We’ve got to be able to sustain government. We have to, and we need to be able to be here so that we can get the community back up and running.”
Horry County is now moving forward with a newly proposed 39,000 square foot, $26 million emergency operations center. The facility would be built on a piece of land near the J. Reuben Long Detention Center, already owned by the county. The facility would also house the county’s E-911 department.
“It’s a reality now, and I think county council took the steps to make sure of that,” Horry County Council Chairman Mark Lazarus said. Some of them were still questioning the expense. How are we really going to spend that kind of money? Well, we haven’t heard a peep since this storm now, and they really saw in action what happens and the issues that we were still having – people on top of each other. We need a much more efficient location and I think that’s where we’re going.”
County council has approved funding for the facility’s design. Webster says if the project moves forward without any roadblocks, Horry County could have a new emergency operations center within three years.
“This new EOC, there’s no reason to suspect that (in) 50, 60 years it shouldn’t still be functioning fine. It’s about being here to support the community – our county as a whole from the government perspective – and it has to be.”