Hurricane Ian continues to provide valuable lessons as Bay Area officials prepare for upcoming storm season

TAMPA, Fla. - Rebuilding continues in Southwest Florida more than eight months after the powerful Hurricane Ian left behind a path of destruction and Bay Area officials are using lessons learned from the storm to prepare for the 2023 season.

Katja Miller, the Operations Section Chief for Hillsborough County Emergency Management, said there's a lot of perspective in the aftermath.

"We were very lucky," Miller explained. "Tampa was pretty much a 20-nautical mile pivot of that storm. Within 24 hours, it was a very quick change, just a little wobble in the forecast. And so I think what we can take away from the impacts that we saw down in Fort Myers is it would look very similar here in Tampa. We have a lot of infrastructure here. Downtown Tampa is right on the water. Our coastline over in Pinellas County, right? Even with the beaches and things, all of that would have been a very similar impact. And we have a very large population here as well. So it would have been catastrophic."

Destruction caused by Hurricane Ian. 

She said it just emphasizes the importance of getting the messages and warnings out in a timely fashion. 

READ: Boaters urged to be prepared for changes on Venice waterways due to Hurricane Ian impacts

"The lessons learned really are similar to other things that we see each year when, you know, these communities go through these impacts, making sure that we have great communication with the public. You know, communications is always an area of concern when you have some type of mass communication or outage. Mass energy outage and utilities, those are types of vulnerabilities that we want to make sure we can get back online as quickly as possible because we all depend on those types of things," said Miller.