Commissioner Doug Underhill sent out an email to his constituents over the weekend regarding the safety stand down of the helipad atop the Perdido Key Fire Station that the Board of County Commissioners approved last Thursday.
From: Doug Underhill
Subject: The Truth About the Helicopter Pad on Perdido Key
Date: September 4, 2016 at 8:00:08 AM CDT
Friends and Neighbors,
I hope everyone is having a wonderful Labor Day Weekend. No matter how busy we get, we should never miss the opportunity to relax and enjoy the blessing we have of living in Paradise.
There is a lot of stray voltage and misinformation traveling around the Coconut Telegraph about the Helicopter Pad at the Perdido Key Firehouse. Gene’s surrogate-in-chief, a guy named Randy Cudd, used this issue to spin up his small group of people who are still very angry about losing power. He alone has created the narrative that I am closing the Helipad. Unfortunately, like most things from that camp, it is completely baseless and fabricated. I promised I would bring academic rigor, discipline and integrity to your government. In doing so, I am upsetting those who are invested in the status quo, and these lies are intended to disrupt those efforts. I ask you all to read this and help me spread the truth.
Bottom Line Up Front: I am not closing, or attempting to close, the helipad.
The real story: I have called for a safety stand-down (standard operating procedure in the aviation industry) because of serious defects in our management of the facility:
1. It was never registered/Inspected by FDOT
2. It has never been inspected by the FAA since before flight operations began.
3. There is no regimen of periodic maintenance on the facility. None.
4. We had no insurance that would cover a crash. None. Think about that one.
5. There are no safety procedures in place, not even the basic daily “FOD Walkdowns” that keep the flight deck clean.
6. There are no Emergency Procedures in place…neither written, spoken, or exercised. Consider this: A crash on the roof that dumps burning aviation fuel over the firehouse will render the equipment in the firehouse unusable. How would that be dealt with?
7. When I query the staff, I get delays, obfuscated answers and a circling of the wagons. (Anyone who has ever had a leadership role would recognize this as a critical defect in the culture of the workplace.)
This stand-down will not affect the ability of our contractor to conduct a helicopter extraction on Perdido Key. Only half of the emergency flights off the Key originate from this rooftop helipad. Helicopter extractions occur safely and routinely from prepared and unprepared ground sites around the County.
In the spring of 2014 your jail blew up, killing and injuring people and plunging the county into a financial crisis from which we will not soon recover. Politics has caused us to gloss over the issue, and no “root cause analysis” has been done or will be done. The 7 conditions above are very similar to the culture and environment that existed prior to the explosion. I fear that we are no more serious today about managing our assets and our risk than we were when the jail blew up. I am asking the hard questions on this issue because I cannot tolerate a preventable catastrophe like the jail explosion. THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN ON MY WATCH.
Respectfully,
Doug