Rego: One of the things I saw that was unique was WTVJ’s plan. Could you talk about this plan?

Norcross: Well, we knew that somebody in the system of emergency preparedness had to be able to answer people’s questions. The way the system works, the people that are knowledgeable on the subject are directly involved, feverishly trying to deal with the crisis at hand. So there would not be anyone to answer some of the publics’ personal questions. That was part of the original thinking on how to position ourselves, what we needed to do. So one of the parts of our planning process was to be sure, as part of our on the air plan, that we were be able to address these questions without the need, to ask a Kate Hale, or some other so called “expert” in the field, of which there are very, very, few. There are more now than there were then. More people know more about hurricane preparedness now than they did prior to Andrew. So we made it a point over three years, to try and be informed first of all. Secondly, we made it a point to try and be sure that we could stay on air to the best of our ability (on television and radio), by having duplicate paths to get our signal out, and having generators, and a variety of other internal back up systems, so we could continue to get data. This turned out to be extremely valuable because we were the only ones that could actually locate the hurricane during the storm, once the Miami Radar failed. And also, the other issue was that the other stations did not have anyone knowledgeable on the subject anyway, to be able to interpret the information that was coming in on the fly, about what that meant.

Rego: You were the main element behind this plan. How did this idea trigger?

Norcross: Well, when Channel Four hired me from Channel Ten we talked about what we wanted to do to improve the image of the weather department in Channel Four, or to give it an image. Up until that time, for many, many years here, the image of the weather department was Bob Weaver. And then the management some years ago, made a choice to replace Bob on the six and eleven o’clock shows with a guy named Cliff Morrison. And so at that time, they just decided to have a nice personality do the weather though there was no credibility behind it. Cliff was not a meteorologist he was just a nice guy on TV. So when they hired me the idea was to sell credibility again so we talked about what we would do. I knew that Channel Ten was not in the mood to prepare for hurricane coverage, because I had tried to get them to do that for six years when working there. So I saw that as a point of vulnerability on their part. So that was part of our plan from a marketing standpoint, to push the idea that “Channel Four is your hurricane station” and then once we decided to do that, thankfully, the television station did more than just market it, they supported it with money. So we were able to actually accumulate the information and equipment that we needed.

Rego: How did that happen specifically?

Norcross: Well, we sat down and had a meeting and decided that we were going to be in the hurricane information business. And they said “Okay, you tell us what we need,” and I said, “Well, we need a couple of things: we need some equipment, and backup equipment, at the weather office. We probably should call the weather office something formidable, so we chose Storm Center, Channel 4 Storm Center. And we need to hire, I need some help. If we are going to produce hurricane specials and we are going to do special information programs and segments on the news, I need help in doing that. So from the very beginning, my first day here, I had to have an assistant, a producer who is still with me, producing these things. He has also become very knowledgeable on hurricane preparation, which is a major point of support. There is no other weather person in this town, and very, very few, in the country, that have an assistant that is not a meteorologist. I mean I have meteorologist assistants and many weather people do, although not mostly in Miami, but in other markets. But very few if any, have someone who is interested in being sure there will be no information, nonmeteorological information. I mean it may seem logical because of the way it developed here, that the weather man, or the meteorologist would be the one to lead the hurricane coverage, but that is not the way that it would work at Channel Ten, or any other television station. At Channel Ten the lead person on any kind of news coverage would be Ann Bishop, at Channel Seven it would be Rick Sanchez. So theoretically, they would be the ones that would lead the coverage, and/or would be informed when it came to things like evacuations, other nonmeteorological aspects of it. Actually the meteorology is the least of it. Once the storm is bearing down on you it becomes a sociological issue. How a society responds to the crisis, is not a meteorological aspect. It’s coming, (the hurricane is coming) the meteorology is over. Now once we got down back to the storm being here, because of some knowledge about how these things work, I was able to talk a little more intelligently about what neighborhoods were more directly affected at that moment, and how long they might be affected, and so forth. But if you looked at the overall scope of the coverage immediately around the crisis it was about 15% meteorology and 85% social assistance in terms of evacuation, and shelters, and electricity, and other sets of knowledge that came from studying Hurricane Hugo, and talking at length with Kate Hale, and Art in Broward, and Billy Wagner in the Keys, and Kennedy in Palm Beach County, and Bob Sheets, and other people that are in the Hurricane business.

Rego: Historians and other people in the future are going to be interested in why you were so effective, which you clearly were, in relation to other people in town. What would you attribute it to, that you particularly did, that was different to everyone else in broadcasting other than being prepared?

Norcross: Well, being knowledgeable. The fact is that in the other television stations they did not know what to say, and they didn’t have any place to get the information because the television news departments in general, are set up to respond to an event. Its really an event driven kind of process, where something happens, the television reporter goes out, and either observes it or asks about it, and dutifully reports what they saw or what they are told. I mean that’s the system, right? This was an entirely different mechanism. What we were asked to do, or what we did, and what the other stations were unable to do two days prior to the storm, was anticipate what was going to happen based on experience, and advise people what they should do to mitigate their risk. So that is an entirely different, self generating, sort of set of information as opposed to an observational based set of information. So that is why we were able to do that where the other stations were not able to do that. That is why if you look at the other coverage, they’re telling you over and over again, how the winds are rising. What they are doing is observing what they saw. In other words the traffic is there. They are not anticipating because they have not studied it to be able to anticipate.

Rego: To some extent you were overcoming some traditional myths about hurricanes and misconceptions. It seems to me that you came up with some very good sets of advice for people. Where did you get those sources?

Norcross: Again my producer Scott Seavers and I sat around and asked ourselves a lot of questions and then made it a point to go out and ask people. The issue for instance of, “Do you leave a window open?”, we asked I don’t know how many structural engineers and wind research people, the specific question because that question has come up so often. “What do you do with your house? Okay, let’s start with the windows. What do you do with the windows? Do you leave them open or closed? How important are shutters?” You know, so we went out and sought answers. In the case of shutters we actually did the shutter test. We put tape on windows, and brought pressure to them, to see what happened without tape, with tape, with shutters. And we just asked a lot of those kinds of questions or tried to actually come up with answers on our own on an empirical basis. So we tried to anticipate and we actually sat down and tried to think, what questions people have. All right, here is a question: “ Now I have to evacuate. Do I really have to evacuate?” “So what’s the law?” “What’s the procedure going to be?” “Are they going to come and drag me out of here if I don’t go?” “So what are you going to do?” We asked the police, we asked various people what the procedure was going to be so we could anticipate that. “Okay, do I really have to evacuate?” “Am I really in an evacuation zone?” “How am I going to find out?” Well, there is no real way to find out. The system in South Florida stinks for finding out, especially if you live near the edge of something, if you really are in an evacuation zone. It is a bad system. “Well if I am going to leave where should I go?” “Maybe I should go to a shelter.” “Where is there a shelter?” We have no system for communicating this kind of information. Its a horrible thing. So you know, we tried to press the system there to try to anticipate these kinds of questions, and answer them ahead of time. So indeed all of these questions did come up; they were logical questions. It would be hard to imagine that they wouldn’t come up. So we just asked the appropriate people ahead of time in the same way that if these people were available at the time of the crisis, which I knew they weren’t going to be, we would have asked them then. But we knew they weren’t going to be available because we have in this country, a grossly, under funded, response disaster system. So the key people can’t stand back and let the system work, they have to work it.

Rego: In terms of the fact that we had the hurricane this year and that you had been preparing for a couple of years. How long can a television station for example, be prepared and not have the disaster happen?

Norcross: Well, that is a really good question. One that has to do with the fortitude of the management. It’s unclear what would have happened, I mean there is a reasonable chance I wouldn’t be here today if it hadn’t been for the hurricane. That’s not at all certain but there is a reasonable chance that that is the case. And would the person that would have replaced me, would they have been interested in pursuing that marketing tact or not? Is it unknown? These are all questions that there will never be an answer for. And it really depends though, on the television station how dedicated they are. This television station based on the fact that it is a second or third placed television station, it has been for some years, and it is driven by a company that doesn’t like to be in third place, certainly is inclined to make changes. Obviously, since the hurricane, both anchors, both main anchor people have been changed or will be changed soon. And you’ve seen changes in our format and presentation and what not. That’s driven by some unrest at the management level and some research. Although changes are a problem always, so its always the old way or do I want to sit with it. So it is always a very, very difficult call. But anyway, its always hard, so what parts do you change? If Channel Ten had been us, and had been in the mode of being prepared, they would have the ability, no doubt the willingness, to sit with that a lot longer. To sit with everything, they have been sitting with the same news cast for a long, long time now even though it is showing significant signs of erosion, and their audience is getting very, very old to the point that in this market, if you look at key demographics, its very, very tight between the stations. You know, we win some, they win some, I mean it is very tight.

Rego: What is disturbing of all of this, and this is in no way meant to diminish what you did or what the station did, but you are talking about this being a marketing strategy.

Norcross: Well, it is! It is a matter of degree I guess. If you went over to Channel Ten people and asked them if they thought they are acting irresponsibly, they are acting the way they do every single day. Their view of their part of the system is to have the official people tell them what to report and they dutifully report it accurately and fairly. So it depends on your view of what a television station’s role is. I mean, Channel Four, if they decide “Okay, we are not going to be in that role anymore we are going to take Channel Ten’s view of what the television station’s role is, then it is hard to argue with them that that is being irresponsible. And that no television station had taken this path in the past, the path that we took, then maybe that is all we expected.

Rego: Is this the role for another public agency maybe public television or something subsidized?

Norcross: The difference between the American system and virtually, any other system in the world, in the developed world, is that television and emergency management and public information, and education are all under the same umbrella of the government. They are all intimately tied together. When the Japanese people were here I spoke to them. They were amazed that I didn’t have a script, that somebody over here, that was some simple expert in this field, was not giving me a script to then read. And they couldn’t imagine the kind of system where they would be asked to generate the information themselves. And they never really get a good grasp on, “that is not the American system”, for better or for worse, but that is not the American system. But we are unique in that regard. The fact is though that the system that we have, for better or for worse, is personality driven. It is first amendment driven in that any tendency to take the ability or the right of a television broadcaster to say pretty much what they want, on the television, and be as prepared as they want, or not as prepared as they want, is some sense thought to be unAmerican. But the fact is that the system really relies on broadcasters being informed but there is no real insistence that they are. It is a difficult problem, a significant failure of the overall system. I worked pretty hard with Emergency Management in the State of Florida, trying to come up with a better system, for them to provide information so that any uninformed broadcaster can provide current accurate information of which there is no information flown out. And the actual fact is that in Dade County we are the best in the state, and thank God this happened in Dade County. We would not even begin to know what it would be like if this had happened Tampa, or some other part of the state. Of course they also don’t have the in general density population either, but Dade County is so far advanced in terms of emergency management, and emergency rescue, and all these other aspects of it, as bad as it is, so far ahead of most other places. That if a hurricane of this magnitude were threatening the Tampa Bay area they would not know where to start. First of all you don’t have two counties or three counties, you’ve got twelve or fifteen counties. Now how does the small county ever get it’s information out? There is no system for that. I fight with them all the time for these counties. So I ask Pasco county: “How are you going to get your information out on Channel Eight in Tampa, when there are fourteen other counties that are trying to get their information out and tallied in Tampa?” There is no system. So I devised a system and I presented it to them and said: “Here, here is a system!” So I don’t know if they are ever going to do it or not. The system essentially is that: every county publishes a newsletter every hour, that has the latest information, and that all flow this to the television stations, through some central emergency office. That way, each television station doesn’t have to man every county.

Rego: How are you going to have lines up for example?

Norcross: So what during the storm, my concern is six hours before the storm.

Rego: Can the FCC do anything to force the stations to have an emergency plan?

Norcross: That is a very good question. Part of all my suggestions for the state was that they approach the FCC with part of license renewal. That each television in the country and radio station, should present their disaster plan whether it is a hurricane disaster or any kind of disaster plan lived. How are they going to provide the public with current and timely and accurate information. How are they going to do it? You know, go ask Joy 107 radio how they are going to provide it. They don’t even do news, let alone have a plan for responding to a disaster. So theoretically, it would force them to align themselves with another news organization, at a certain point in the disaster.

Rego: Have you been asked by anything like congressional sub-committee hearings or FCC hearings?

Norcross: The governor appointed me to this committee. We had a whole series of hearings on how the state system should work better. And that is where I presented this set of ideas and I presented in conferences. But I don’t think there is any appreciation, I don’t think anyone has thought this out, anyone has really figured out how the system works just because they haven’t thought about it.

Rego: It’s currently not part of government?

Norcross: No its not part of government, forget government. I don’t think that news people have thought of it. I don’t think that news managers have thought of it. They thought out that they want to be able to respond, but I don’t think they’ve really thought out the fact that in general, in a disaster setting, you always run into this kind of problem if you don’t have people on your staff who are knowledgeable, on the air.

Rego: Television and radio came together. How did this work? What were the difficulties that you found?

Norcross: It really wasn’t very difficult. I approached Y100. Previously, we had worked with Magic 102.7. I approached Y100 because Y100 and WAXI Radio are operated by the same people now. And my idea was, the most secure back up transmitter is owned by WAXY, its cemented on the top of the, CNS building, whatever it is, in downtown, Fort Lauderdale. It is not on a tower sitting out there in the antenna farm, it is cemented on the top, a short tower. It has a separate transmitter that is gas driven, doesn’t require any electricity or fuel except for . So I wanted to have that as our backup transmitter. So I went through Y100 because Channel Ten has had this with WAXY. So I went to Y100 and worked out a deal that they would be our partner and we put in a dedicated line to them. We put it dedicated directly to their transmitter, in case they had to evacuate, which indeed they did, because their studio sits right on the water in Fort Lauderdale, so we ran our system directly into their transmitter. It wasn’t a problem, they were anxious to participate, it was just a matter of working out the details. So this year our plan would be more sophisticated in terms of backup communication system.

Rego: You spoke of the storm center. What was not there during the storm if anything that you would like to see added to the storm center?

Norcross: The most important piece of equipment that we had was the radar. The world of radar is changing rapidly. One of the first things that I wanted and sort of insisted on, was a connection to the West Palm Beach Radar which cost us several thousand dollars in initial investment, three years ago. None of the other stations have wanted to pay that money. So when the Miami radar failed, we went to the West Palm Beach radar and we could still locate the hurricane, and nobody else could do that. We did it originally not just to have that backup capability but also because the West Palm Beach Radar, that famous ground clutter that you see on Channel Ten, means that with the Miami Radar they were not able to see rain and data out of Miami. It is not as bad in West Palm Beach so we could actually locate rain that they could not locate. So it was just a good thing, we call it clear view radar. So it was a good thing for the viewer. Well, but as what’s called Next Rad, the new government Docu Rad systems are now coming aligned, and because the radar lines failed the Miami Next Rad is moved up a couple of years and we’ll have it operating here this year. Where that takes us is unclear, because the Next Rads are very nice, but they are very sophisticated computer systems that fail a lot. As they get these on line the older radars will be taken out of service. So, how we protect ourselves in the future, is going to be an interesting question for which we don’t have an answer for at this time. We will continue to do it on a yearly basis looking to see what our options are and being sure that we are tied into these options, Key West Radars, Melbourne Asadoper. So we will just have to see. Everything is evolving very rapidly. As far as other information, we just didn’t need it because as the storm approached I went into the weather office less and less, and less and less. It just wasn’t important. We got Bob Sheets on the air by telephone or by the camera, by the camera until it failed, until microwave failed, and then by telephone. To get the reports I had one of the weather people bring the written reports out of the aircraft to see what the aircraft was reporting but essentially I was just confirming that with Bob Sheets on the air. I’d say, “It looks on the report that the winds are down a little bit. Would you confirm that with your other information?” We would talk about it like that but it wasn’t a critical aspect of our coverage. The main issue was getting the people evacuated and getting them safe. It wasn’t a matter of being sure to put the last dot on the tracking map.

Rego: What did you tell people to do? What were the main concerns you had?

Norcross: Well, my biggest concern, I was sort of building on tradition here. Tradition tells you that more people die in hurricanes in flooding than anything else. So our main concern on Sunday, was getting people evacuated. Getting them out of the evacuation zone. And you evacuate people for two reasons: one is because flooding is dangerous, and people die in flooding, and the other is that there is some concern that if people are in an area for instance in Miami Beach, that would not be flooded (all of Miami Beach would not be flooded), in a worse case storm, on the West side of Miami Beach, you would not find life threatening water, but if people are hurt the odds are that the causeway would be closed and you would not have any way to get to them. So you evacuate people so that you can deal with the problems after the storm. So that was sort of the main concern. There were other concerns about the special needs people that had not registered to be picked up well in advance. So it came a point that they were not going to be picked up, they were going to be left. That was a real painful sort of moment. And other than that, as the storm came close, it turned out to be a rather spectacular storm then it became an issue of, “all right everybody, let’s evaluate your situation now and figure out where the risk is the least based on where you are right now.” Everybody was at risk. At one point it was clear that everybody in South Florida was at risk, and then everybody in Dade County was at risk, and then that everybody in South Dade was at risk. In any building, any shelter, any anywhere, everyone was at some level of risk. So the idea was to minimize your risk. If you are in a shelter there is really nothing you can do. You’re there you’ve done what you could do. If you are in a house then the idea was to get into that closet, the hallway or the bathroom with the mattress, get under the mattress. And the mattress was a spur of the moment idea, that I had in the idea of what can we think of to minimize risk. What can people get under? Get the mattress off the bed. And that turned out to be a wonderful thing.

Rego: That is very interesting in that I talked to so many people that have gone through previous hurricanes and the mattress and the center hallway I think you probably must have invented. I suspect that must have saved many lives.

Norcross: Yes, by our reports, yeah.

Rego: Do you have any notion, do you have any figures about how many people probably got saved by a mattress?

Norcross: I don’t know. It is very difficult to get killed by wind you can almost always get down behind something. So it is more likely that people who got under the mattress didn’t get hurt as things blew around, and blew into them. You have to be sort of unlucky to get killed by wind. Even in poorly protected homes. Which most homes were.

Rego: How about the different calls that you received on air while the hurricane was going on? What was your feeling towards these people a lot of them referred to you as “the voice in the darkness” and “the General Schwarzkopf of the airways”.

Norcross: Well, you can understand how that was. I didn’t really anticipate that ahead of time, but because it was dark, and it was pitch black, and there was this just horrific noise, and the whole house was shaking or coming apart, the only sort of voice of reason was coming out of the radio. Here we had people that did not know what was going on. The only way that they had any idea of what was going on was the voice that was coming out of the radio. So I understood the attachment after the fact. The phone calls turned out to be vital in just allowing people (I had this told to me over and over again) that felt so alone, that they thought they were the only ones going through it. “It couldn’t possibly be this bad for everybody else.” To find it was this bad for other people, made it much more bearable for them, to realize that other people were going through the same thing. And that when I said to Madilyn Martinez: “You’ve got to hold that door!” that inspired other people to get up and hold the door because other people were going through the same situation. That is what turned out to be so critical.

Rego: Was there any one call that was special to you?

Norcross: There were the few right there in the middle of the storm. They were all along the same lines: “Where do we go?”, “Do we stay here?”, “Is there some place where we can go?” The answer was almost always: “No just stay right where you are. If its not coming down on top of you, you are better off where you are than going out into the unknown.” That was the bottom line advice.

Rego: We have story after story from these hurricane interviews of people who say they would have just flipped out if they did not hear your voice over and over.

Norcross: As it turned out that was the key. First of all, I have a distinctive voice, and having a voice that was there continuously, I think made a lot of difference, so it was familiar. I think that if somebody else started talking it wouldn’t have worked that well.

Rego: You were on the air for 23 hours straight. How was that?

Norcross: Well, twentytwo, twentythree hours I was off for a couple of halfhours through the day to prepare things. Its very hard to stay on the air that long because you need sources of information, you need to find out some things that occur, you know, you need to do things. So I took a wired telephone to near the desk so I could make calls from there to get a question answered, get a problem solved, get something done. But I had to take some breaks, a couple of breaks.

Rego: Did you ever feel threatened while the hurricane was going on?

Norcross: Only in the sense that everybody was at risk, They said to me “Where can we go that is safe?,” but I said, “There is no place safe.” We don’t know if the roof is going to stay on the building. Flat roofs are the worst kinds of roofs and there is a big flat roof right over the studio. So one of the driving forces behind developing the bunker was that, as the storm became stronger, and stronger, and it looked to me just visually, like we may very well have ended up in the core part of it, I thought: “I don’t like this studio here at all let’s come up with an alternative.” Immediately after I thought of it, “This is a very good thing because we’ll just move even if it doesn’t look like we really need to, we’ll just move as a key for other people to take it seriously.” The whole thing in communicating with people is providing clues and being credible. That is what communication is all about, right? So this was a clue and a credibility sort of hook.

Rego: As you read the radar was there anything unusual about the hurricane, did you ever say this is really a different hurricane?

Norcross: Yes. The only thing unusual was that it was so small. Thankfully, it was a very small hurricane, not thankfully for the people in South Dade, because small tight eyes like that have tremendous winds in these narrow bands. We had that narrow band of tremendous winds across the 152nd street area. That’s somewhat unusual. It was a very young hurricane and young hurricanes don’t have time to grow, so they are very small and intense in this case, because the condition is right for it to grow. Not too dissimilar to the 1935 Key’s hurricane which turned out to be the strongest hurricane ever to hit the United States. It was a tropical storm a little thirtysix hours before it hit. So these things happen, though it was as little tiny storm. The day that storm hit the middle Keys, they had a parade in downtown Miami. So these kinds of storms exist and do occur, though not usually. Usually, they are bigger, have broader eyes about them, affect a larger area.

Rego: Historically there has been a wide variability in terms of storms and this is the first major storm to hit in a very long time so people have the impression that this is what hurricanes are about. Obviously, there are other types of hurricanes. How do you think people may be misled by the Hurricane Andrew experience as a type of hurricane?

Norcross: Well, people get misled by a lot of things because they don’t want to think. It is a major problem we have people they just don’t want to think, its in the human condition. The more ignorant people are, the more uneducated they are, the less inclined they are to think because it gets confusing, because people want specific answers to complicated questions and the answer is: “Oh well, what would a hurricane be like in Fort Lauderdale?” Well, depends on where it came ashore, and how big it was, and depends on a whole set of variables and that, I can’t answer to when I describe the hurricane. However, thankfully, we have excellent computer models to know what some aspects of it would be like. And there isn’t any reason to think that any part of South Florida wouldn’t look like South Dade if the weather conditions were transposed to that area. But the sociology of it, and I don’t think there is any inability for us to communicate with more than maybe half the population ahead of time to make them prepare properly, maybe half the population. If we started to educate people in schools, then maybe as we look down the road, as they get turned into adults, then maybe we have a chance to do better than that. But I don’t think there is any way that we can have anything more than a hurricane plan that is 48 hours in implementation for at least half the people, because they are going to start paying attention when they feel threatened, and they are going to have a natural reaction to dismiss it, to look for reasons to dismiss the threat, prior to actually feeling threatened.

Rego: What was your interaction with Bob Sheets right after the Hurricane Center’s radar failed?

Norcross: When the radar failed at the hurricane center, they had access to exactly the same information that we did. They just immediately after the Miami radar failed, because their building was shaking, and everything else going on in there, they just hadn’t done it yet. So the press made a big deal out of my describing what I was seeing on the West Palm Beach radar, but their equipment was working, they had the ability to access, they just hadn’t at that moment. It was really an overplayed thing, just a matter of timing, they had access to the Melbourne operator, and to the West Palm Beach radar if they had wanted it. They didn’t know the Miami radar was going to fail. When I saw the Miami radar fail, I had Brian Allen immediately go get West Palm Beach. But with everything going on down there at the hurricane center, they just hadn’t done it yet. But it wasn’t like they were missing information, the Hurricane was on top of them, they didn’t have to wonder where it was.

Rego: When did you first view the destruction?

Norcross: Well, I didn’t view the overall destruction I didn’t see it until Thursday when Bob Sheets and I went up in a helicopter. I left here (the station) late Monday night, early Tuesday morning, back to Coconut Grove, and the North Grove where I live, and certainly saw that. And Tuesday morning as I was coming back, looking around, because you couldn’t drive very far, I had to walk down to Bayshore Drive. So that was the first time I really got very far out of the station. But my impression of it over all initially was: “Well, this is what I expected.” Then after the fact, it was more than I expected. I did not expect to see so many houses fail. I really didn’t have any reason to. I never lived in a new house. I had no reason to believe that they were built as poorly as they were. So I didn’t expect to see the vast areas of constructed houses fail.

Rego: So you think that major destruction problem was primarily failed building codes and failed construction?

Norcross: No, I think it was failed construction. I think that the building code as it was written, was not a prescriptive code, it was a code of intent. For years that worked, until people found out ways that fulfilled in some cases, the letter of the coding, and also not even that, but certainly not the intent of the code. The intent of the code was that the house had to be strong. And that was really the bottom line intent of the code. And what that got changed into was that: “What we are going to demonstrate is that this house or building will indeed meet some specific line,” when the intent of the code was that it would easily meet this line, but it would be strong beyond that line. And so this line became like the speed limit is, the way it was implemented as opposed to the average speed, and so that just shrunk everything down so far. There were a lot, a lot, of design errors, implementation errors, no question about that. But, I think it was more in the way it was implemented, and allowed to be implemented, than the specific design of the code. There is no question, I don’t think, that if the intent of the code had been upheld by the building department over the years, it wouldn’t have happened. There wouldn’t have been so many uninhabitable homes. As long as people refuse to put shutters on the windows you had a lot of wrecked homes, but probably not uninhabitable. The homes would have had to be cleaned up, the carpets ripped out because water came in the windows, but not roofs blowing off. Under the modern construction system, as soon as part of the system fails the whole system fails. Where roofs that have a lot of cross bracing and stuff like that, would allow a piece of the roof to go off, but the roof would stay intact.

Rego: What about a lot of condominiums that are along the Brickell and the Beach and so forth, that don’t have storm shutters or even houses? What is your feeling about requirements of having these?

Norcross: I have been saying it for years, it ought to be part of building a house. I think it is not just in the interest of the person that buys the house, I think it is in the communities interest not to have various areas of destruction in the community. It hurts things economically, you end up with this whole huge mess. People think that the government should come along and pick up huge piles of debris of wrecked homes. After remodeling your home you have to pay for dumpsters. When I remodeled my home, prehurricane, I had to pay for dumpsters, that is the business. I had dumpsters in front of my house and I had to pay somebody to haul it away. And now all of the sudden, because they weren’t responsible and put up the shutters on their house, they expect the government to come and haul it away. Its in the governments interest to come and haul it away because we have to develop a community, we’ve got people who live it. I have got to have an economy. So yes, now its all in the government’s interest, to spend the money to come and haul this stuff away. So it is in the governments interest for people to protect their homes in the first place. Its in the communities interest. So yeah, I don’t think there should be a building built that doesn’t have some kind of window protection. In homes I mean, shutters. Certainly, in high risers it is much more complicated.

Rego: Why so?

Norcross: Well, because how do you put a shutter on the outside of a highrise? You have hundreds of thousands of windows in a high rise. Do you shutter every one or do you come up with some kind of system, glass system? Maybe the glass is set in and maybe there is some kind of part of the building that slides in, or the glass is somehow naturally protected. Maybe its some fancy kind of glass that has a plastic liner or sheet on the outside of it. Something, something. I think that every kind of window should have some kind of protection on it, not necessarily shutters, but some kind.

Rego: With your experience with this what would have happened, what would have Brickell Avenue looked like?

Norcross: Well, Brickell Avenue was substantially trashed I mean, just in terms of the magnitude of the disaster it was so small compared to South Dade, but there were whole buildings over there where every apartment was trashed.

Rego: Speaking to an architect, the main concern here would also be the expense. People when they are building their homes want to spend as little as possible.

Norcross: It doesn’t cost a dime more to build a house with shutters than it does one without shutters, its just that the house might end up being five percent smaller. Houses are built by square foot, right? So say that it costs $100.00 by square foot for a house incorporated in Dade county. Well, all right, say we can save twenty square feet, there is two thousand bucks. There are your shutters. Its not a matter of raising the price of the house, it is a matter of designing the shutters into the house, so that they fit into the overall pricing structure that you have determined. And the fact is that the insurance companies will be able to program and create an incentive. So if you don’t have shutters on your house you will pay off 50 cents on the dollar. If you do have shutters on the house then you don’t. And then, that would drive the mortgage companies into insisting on shutters, and the whole problem would be solved.

Rego: Do you think it will happen?

Norcross: I think there is going to be some effort. Dade County is already leading the way. It’s not a simple problem. The architectural community needs to get their minds around it and say: “We are going to design houses with the idea that windows are going to be shuttered, and we are going to make it easy, and it’s going to be cheap, and it’s going to be nothing, if you design the system in the first place. It’s going to take time to make it happen. It’s very easy to imagine a whole system of designing windows and shutters all together: before putting the window in, first you put the thing that is going to hold the shutter in, its a little gadget, then the window goes in behind it, and whambam its in. Its easy to imagine, if it is conceived from the beginning, its not such a problem.

Rego: About the talk shows that you had about the hurricane. I saw that a lot of the problems that people had with the government was the lack of communication? The government could not get to the people the information of the services they had available. How do you see this working out right now?

Norcross: Horribly, its terrible because there is no where to go. In fact I’m pressing the state government to come in here and solve this problem. The fact is that Dade County has never built anymore than I think it is, 4400 or 4800 homes a year, ever, in the history of the county, in the early eighties, the boom years. And now you have 80 some thousand homes that have to be rebuilt. So that is 40 years worth of houses. And so the system that is designed for one twentieth of the magnitude of the problem, clearly is not going to be sufficient to handle this situation. The rules are not appropriate to the situation. So until somebody at governmental level, and its got to be someone on the state governmental level, is willing to come in and say that: “This is not acceptable, and I need, right now, today, an executive order for this and I need this”, and “we are going to figure out a way to take this responsibility from the county, let them do what they normally do but for this emergency situation its going to be administered this way.” Until something like that can happen, and it may never happen because the state doesn’t seem to have the fortitude to really want to do it, and the county doesn’t have the ability to do it, and Dade County’s government barely functions anyway, so I don’t know that in this situation it can happen. You have a feeling that if you were dealing with Charleston, South Carolina, where the mayor stands up and says: “We are going to do it this way!” You have a guy that is in charge. We don’t have anybody in charge here. If the governor had come down and said, “We are taking this over. We are doing this, this way. We are not going to usurping anything in Dade County. You are going to be able to operate just like you always have, we are going to cooperate with you but we are going to administer it because we have the resources and the authority.” The county has a great excuse they say that the department of Construction Regulation is at the state level regulates those contractors. And they are operating under state rules which we don’t have any say over. It’s very true. State rules don’t apply to the situation. The idea of giving a contractor eighty-nine days of nonwork, and have him still be deemed to operate effectively under their license, doesn’t apply to this situation. So it has to work from the top down. Dade County can’t drive it up. At least it doesn’t look that way because state law always supersedes county law. So if the thing had been done at a state level, and I am still pushing that, I am still pushing to get the state in here in a major way, in a high profile light, somebody to say this isn’t acceptable.

Rego: You are a prominent reporter, weatherman, media person, we have a major natural disaster, the largest natural disaster in the history of this country financially and probably psychologically, and all of the sudden you are made into a movie of that on NBC. Are you involved with that?

Norcross: I am a consultant for the movie.

Rego: What is your feeling about that in terms of the relationship between what you do which is the news and weather reporting and the media phenomenon?

Norcross: I don’t know, as far as how I feel about it, I don’t feel any which way or the other about it, some of it is fun. I have the ability to do things that I have never done before, participate in movies, and go on national talk shows, all that stuff is really fun. Since I have been in the media, I have been involved in lots of things that I had never done before. I got to be on Hollywood Squares because Channel Ten ran Hollywood Squares and they needed a local person. So it is sort of part of it, and no doubt its a higher profile part of it, at this point. But my expectation is that it will be somewhat short lived, from a national standpoint, once the movie is over. This year is a very busy year in terms of speeches and stuff like that. From a personal standpoint, it has made me very busy. It’s busy doing a lot of things that are somewhat mundane, a lot, a lot, a lot, of things that are somewhat mundane, returning phone calls and things like that, and it’s busy doing other things that are fun. Last week, I had to go to Los Angeles to do the Vicki Lawrence show, but I had to get out Wednesday morning, and come back Thursday night, and that wasn’t fun, but doing the show was fun. So its just very, very, very busy, exceptionally busy.