INDIAN ROCKS BEACH — Hundreds of residents streamed through City Hall on June 27 for the city’s first Hurricane Preparedness Expo, a free event that grew out of the new City Commission’s push to learn from the 2024 storms.
The three-hour exhibition, set up inside and outside City Hall on June 27, drew dozens of vendors and organizations and marked the first public initiative from the city’s Hurricane Task Force, a 10-member panel of residents and business owners seated this spring.
“It has been 640 days (since the storms) and there’s been no after-the-fact analysis,” Mayor Lan Vaughan said around midday June 27 from the bustling expo floor. “So, as soon as the new board was seated, we immediately implemented a Hurricane Task Force to assess the situation in the city. And this expo is a direct result of that.”
The task force was one of the first moves by the reconfigured City Commission after it was seated in March, an idea City Manager Ryan Henderson had floated after he was hired in September. Vaughan, a former city commissioner who defeated incumbent Denise Houseberg in March, was elected mayor as part of that shake-up.
“Part of the duties would be to look at lessons learned from the 2024 storms,” Henderson said in April, referring to hurricanes Helene and Milton, the powerful back-to-back storms that battered the Gulf Coast within two weeks that fall.
He said the task force would be made up of residents and business owners who would assess the city’s hurricane preparedness, identify vulnerabilities and develop recommendations for strengthening the community’s resilience to severe weather.
The group’s first realization, member Jennifer Landry said, was that residents had nowhere to turn for reliable storm information in one place. Officials had directed the panel to “do a postmortem on the storms and the damage they caused and to figure out how we can be better prepared,” she said — and the expo grew out of that.
Landry, who owns the Chicago Jax pizzeria — shuttered since Hurricane Milton in October 2024 but set to reopen soon — said she was stunned by the turnout given the short timeline to pull the event together. She credited much of that effort to Mishelle Hargett, the city’s public information officer.
“Mishelle really rocked it!” Landry said as she sat outside the auditorium with her 7-year-old son, Liam, in the shadow of a Pinellas Suncoast Fire & Rescue Department ladder truck. A towering banner on the truck depicted the storm surge levels the beach communities could face in a severe storm.
Inside the air-conditioned auditorium, representatives from dozens of vendors and organizations lined the room, among them Home Depot, Lowe’s, the Pinellas Suncoast Fire & Rescue Department and Pinellas County government. State Rep. Kim Berfield and WFTS-TV meteorologist Greg Dees also attended.
Near the entrance, Roger Singh greeted guests and explained the S.A.F.E.R. Sandbag Rentals service he created to help homeowners shore up their properties before a storm.
“Typically, you’ve got to go to a park or public works building, and you’re limited to the number of bags you can get,” said Singh, noting that some communities fill the bags while others leave that to residents. “So, if you get 10 bags at 40 pounds each, that’s 400 pounds you have to lug around. And that’s a lot.”
Singh, a technology-industry veteran, said he worked with local governments and home improvement stores to “see what we could do to get sandbags delivered to homeowners faster.” The platform, developed with an Amazon grant, uses ZIP codes, flood-alert maps and other client data to “figure out damage faster and where to allocate resources,” he said.
The subscription-based service handles delivery and pickup of the bags. Singh likened it to a home security service “like ADP,” adding, “Technology used correctly is always a winner.”
Toward the back, near the commission dais, Kelsey Whidden, a stormwater and floodplain project manager for the design and engineering firm CivilSurv, demonstrated a new public website that lets Indian Rocks Beach residents look up flood-risk data for individual properties.
“This is a blue-sky as well as a post-disaster tool that allows the city to meet certain requirements to get more insurance credits,” Whidden said, noting that the system includes a substantial structural damage estimator “that’s much easier to use than FEMA’s.”
“It’s amazing, and it really speeds up the (storm recovery) process,” she said, pointing residents to the city’s webpage at indianrocksbeachfl.withforerunner.com.
At his table nearby, Dees chatted with attendees, answered questions, signed autographs and posed for photos with fans of all ages.
Asked whether the county’s severe, monthslong drought had made people less receptive to hurricane preparedness, Dees said the opposite was true.
“The drought has brought out people who are noticing that the weather is changing,” he said. “They’re starting to understand that things are changing, climate is changing, because it’s so hot yet it’s not raining.”
Dees pointed to rising seawater temperatures and shifts in the high- and low-pressure systems that crisscross the state as factors behind the persistent heat and lack of rain. He said the turnout did not surprise him, because the wounds from the 2024 hurricane season remain fresh.
“The community is still recovering,” he said. “So I think it’s important to have events like these, because they serve two main purposes — they are a direct connection between a city or county and its residents. And when a city like this holds an expo, it’s not just for IRB. It’s for everyone in the surrounding communities, too, because they’re affected and they want to know.”
As for the slow start to the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, Dees urged caution.
“The forecast is drier than normal, but that doesn’t mean ‘no hurricanes,’” he said. “Hurricane Andrew happened in the middle of a quiet season in 1992. And we know how that turned out.
“So don’t stop checking the forecast, and don’t let your guard down,” he added. “Because it’s not about the number of storms. It’s where they form. And it only takes one.”