Escambia County Public Safety Director Eric Gilmore said on “Real News” this morning:
“The spaghetti models, if you look at those, they’re narrowing up, which is really good,” he said. “That shows the trending of where it’s going to make landfall. So we’re pretty confident, feeling pretty good about somewhere around the Louisiana coast.”
He continued, “The intensity is something different though. So they’re saying Cat 1, maybe a Cat 2, which depends on how long it lingers out in the Gulf. And there’s a high pressure system in the western side of the Gulf that if it shifts off, that was the steering curve that everybody’s worried about. If that high shifted more to the west, then it was going to draw up more to the east. But this high seems to be going to be stable right there, and it kind of draw it into the Louisiana coast.”
Locally? “We’re going to see localized flooding, so we’ll see rain; we’ll get the rain bands off of it just because it’s not hitting our coastline. The eyewall, we’ll still get the outer bands of it and everything. We’re going to see rip currents, increased, rip currents, some minor to moderate localized coastal flooding. So need to be aware of that and some wind gust as we go through Thursday.”
Mayor Reeves on ST Engineering:
“We opened and closed the meeting that we all have to have the understanding and perspective that this project and this partnership is better together. I can guarantee you that. So there’s no scenario here. We want to see the return on investment from this project, which is jobs and especially local jobs.”
Broken Trust:
“This is a partnership at every level, a multi-year partnership. And the expectation should be that ST is not just creating jobs, but it’s part of the fabric of our community. And lastly, from a jobs reporting standpoint, we’ve significantly raised our expectations of beyond what is in the contract. Because our trust has shaken. We want to see at a more regular basis with the math to back up your assumptions on jobs. We want to see in greater detail and more frequently how things are going.”