284:Crucial Emergency Preparations at the Venice Yacht Club with Bruce Furman
What does a yacht club do when a hurricane is on the horizon? Find out as Bruce breaks down the club's detailed emergency preparedness plan for slip holders, the intricate process of shutting down the club and securing the premises. From his expert point of view, he gives you the lowdown on what to do during a hurricane, and shares the lessons learned from previous hurricanes, underscoring the significance of communication, early action, and continuous learning in disaster preparedness.
Follow us on the socials
Private Club Radio Instagram
Private Club Radio Linkedin
Denny Corby Instagram
Denny Corby Linkedin
Hey everyone, welcome back to Private Club Radio. I'm your host, denny Corby. In this episode I sit down with Bruce Furman, ccm. He is the GM of the VYC Venice Yacht Club down in Venice, florida. In this particular talk we are talking about getting ready for natural disasters. We talk about preparedness. Down in Florida there was a hurricane that came through. Luckily the Venice area got a little bit lucky. But I want to chat with him about how they prepare for situations like this. What's the training like, what's the preparation like? So we go through all of that and he just explains what kind of happened leading up to the most recent hurricane the before, during and after. And because one of those, you always prepare for it. Hopefully you never think it's going to happen, but it actually does. So it was really neat talking and learning about how you train and work hard for it and then, when it actually comes time, they put the full plan into place. And he actually talked about how they put such a great plan into place. They went from taking three days to close shop to less than one day. They got the club ready for a hurricane. So hope you enjoyed this episode, Me and Bruce Furman, gm VYC. Let's go, yeah, so who is Bruce Furman?
Speaker 1:Bruce Furman is full of character, that's for sure and that's because I started in the after high school. I waited a year because I didn't know what I wanted to do and then I went into the Navy because my mom said what are you doing? So two days later I signed up for United States Navy and didn't have any hair and hurry up and wait, marched around. I was on the aircraft carrier Saratoga CB60, and did four years in the military and two years inactive, which made me appreciate missing mom's meatloaf, and found out that people will steal your underwear, which is not good.
Speaker 2:What.
Speaker 1:Navy was a good experience. And I was getting out in a couple of days and I called mom. I said, mom, I don't know what I'm going to do. I know I wanted to get back to Palm Beach Gardens in Florida. And she said well, why don't you call Ken Wise over at the Breakers Hotel? I was in maintenance in the Navy and started working at the Breakers Hotel in 1990. And it was a fantastic experience and the rest is history. I've been in the club business ever since. So that's what? Now 33 years I'm the general manager of the Venice Yacht Club. I came up through facilities maintenance and then got into food and beverage and now running a couple of clubs now. And Venice Yacht Club's a great place. We have 760 members and I am married with three boys and live in Sarasota now. And yeah, that's Bruce, the character Bruce.
Speaker 2:The character Bruce. Now the real Bruce is who we want to know.
Speaker 1:I was actually. I got a quick story that while I was on the Saratoga, one of my maintenance calls was to go work on the steam whistle up way up above the flight deck. And the steam whistle has huge baffles in it and there are multiple baffles and there's a pinhole in it. So the preventative maintenance was to clean the pinhole in all these baffles. Right, so I'm up, I'm way above the flight deck and I had this chief that came up there Bruce, you better tie everything off. That's $8 million below you. So I had to tie my crescent wrenches off all my stuff to do this, because you didn't want anything going through right down onto the Tomcats that were below. Yeah, yeah, so fun story.
Speaker 2:Now, how high were you at this point? Because you're on an aircraft carrier, so you're already up pretty high from the water.
Speaker 1:Four or five stories above. I was above where all the signal men, all the communication guys are, so I was above them outside, yeah, up above at all. Pretty cool spot, man. They were not flying that day but because that's why I was up there, so they're usually flying a lot of practices.
Speaker 2:Imagine if you had like your Blackberry or something Could have like snapped a photo or your Polaroid.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was before. That time I had a I think it was before beepers and all that stuff. Oh, oh yes.
Speaker 2:Oh, sorry, I was. I was still thinking 1990 for some reason, but we're going back 86 to 90, I was in the military.
Speaker 1:I remember one of my friends had the big bulky square phone and we would get in line to pay him to call home. You want the phone numbers? Give me 20 bucks. We were paying like May Verizon. We would put Verizon to shame with our billing schedule. I mean just crazy money.
Speaker 2:That's so funny. So you just had a hurricane go through. What was? Because you had a worse one before. I forget which which one. The last major one was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just brush us. And what was last year's? Oh gosh, I can't remember. Sorry. No it was a year ago. To the, to the month and day Pretty scary.
Speaker 2:That's, that's weird.
Speaker 1:Last year. Last year really, really devastated Fort Myers and this track was very similar to the start to hit Tampa again. And last year's track, of course, turned south right into Fort Myers and it sucked all of our water out of Roberts Bay and and pushed it up into my Aka River and flooded 75 and all in Fort Myers was just flooded. This year's brush with Adalia was, thank goodness, of good practice for us. We have a emergency preparedness team that we meet year round. We meet monthly, pretty much year round, until hurricane season hits, of course, and then we just, you know, we put, put everything in practice, but we implemented, implemented the plan. Our first, our first notification is to all of the slip holders that have a boat. We have 70 slips. So the communication goes out hey, better check your boats. You know this is what we recommend how you tie them down. We're expecting storm surge. You know four to six feet and there's been a. Then we the Dockmaster starts with a lot of communication there At the Venice Yacht Club we have a Commodore who is basically in charge for the year, who is starts that process in place for the club as well, and we ended up walking two or three days before getting all the you know the all the stuff that could fly around, picked up and brought all the tiki furniture inside and a bunch of members came together and we found out the insurance will cover them because it's a club event, right? So any member that's a member can do these small projects because it's under the same insurance umbrella. So we got the club all secured and for the most part sat back and watched and thank goodness the storm surge wasn't as bad. We did have a you know higher than high tide because of the blue moon, so ended up bringing it up really high, but not into the club, I think the Dockmaster's office was flooded and, thank goodness, was minimal damage. We ended up being closed two days and then reopened, put everything out on the third day and reopened and thank goodness, you know, didn't even miss a beat. So that's awesome Shut down. So then we got the club.
Speaker 2:That's awesome shut down.
Speaker 1:So that does affect our month for two days. So we have a whole book, we have a whole. We send letters to the chief, the fire chief and the police chief and they know the names on that emergency preparedness list so they can allow to get on the island because that the certain parts of the island was closed. You know, just down from us the jetty pretty much got washed in and still closed. So it's closed for two weeks because just not safe down there. So we're underwater, Our front door is pretty much at water level, so we sandbagged and got out of the way. A lot of the members came to check on their boats because of the investment that they put in. But we try to try to keep everybody away, we try to communicate. Look, everything's looking good and yeah, so thank goodness it was just a dress rehearsal. But and then we'll sit down and, do you know, do a recap of what went well, what didn't, what we should do, what we should stop doing all those things. And that prepares us, you know, for the next one.
Speaker 2:What were some of those stop doings and change-ups from the most recent storm?
Speaker 1:I think one thing we learned about most recent you know how great communication is. We need to make sure we get more communication out, not only to the members but the team, to let them know do it early, you know. Don't try to open lunch or dinner. Go ahead and close on. You know, monday for Tuesday and Wednesday. Don't try to do a half-day thing, and I think we got caught a little bit trying to open a little early. So just go ahead and say okay, two days, sunny or not, you know we need to make an early decision to be closed. And then we need to let all the team know because they want to pull in and see if we're open. And so we need to make sure we get the techs out to the team early and often, as far as how the shutdown went and everything, I think went unbelievable. It was the fastest time we've got everything shut down and you know we go through water lines and power and gas and everything for the whole club. So we have, you know, pictures of all that. We know where all of valves are. So it was stressful, it was a, you know, major undertaking, but I'm very proud of how everybody you know performed through that time.
Speaker 2:How long? So what was the ramp up time? So how long in advance did you know like this was coming? And then how much time did you know, like at which point was it like, hey, there's this thing possible? And then all of a sudden it gets closer and, like you know, you're probably at some point like, oh, it's going to fizzle. At what point? Where you like, all right, this is getting serious. And then how long did that whole process take? Once you were like game on and you just said it was the fastest. So how long did it used to take? And like, how fast was this one? And what was that process like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so usually it takes us two days to pretty much secure the whole club. We were done in three quarters of a day just for the extra hands there, and the extra hands knew what to do. Right, there's still some things that we can't delegate to the preparedness team, like shutting down the valves and securing things, and the docmaster has to close the power down. But we went from two days to three quarters and I just think that's from meeting and understanding, expectation and understanding you know who should do what in advance, and that made a big difference. I think it started probably that Friday, saturday, where we started saying okay, marina, we got something coming, no matter what it's going to be. It's going to be some wind and weather and we need to be prepared and I think we made the final on, I would say, sunday into Monday we're like okay, time to implement the club operations. It's going to affect operations and we need to make sure we close, get the club taken care of and then let everybody go home and take care of their homes, because that's the other side we need to think of. You know how fast we can do the club and do it efficient, but then let's get the team home so that they want to put shutters up. We have people live in north and south, so we have to make a decision for all and you know so. I think you know, thank goodness, like I said, it hit further north than us and it's a mess up there, but we were. I think we're ready as we were ever going to be, and you know flooding we're not going to stop the flooding, but we were ready for everything.
Speaker 2:And that's great. You took the staff into account and where they were living and all of that sort of thing. It reminds me where did you grow up?
Speaker 1:I grew up in Portland, maine, and then moved down to Florida in the fourth grade. So I grew up most of my life in Florida on the east coast, down along Palm Beach in that area.
Speaker 2:Okay. So you would probably understand then how like here up in the north we have like snow days. You know you can't go to school. But there were so many times where, like our little like couple streets were fine and they look great but you don't see like the rest or where everybody else is at. So to me, when you just said that, like that makes so much sense it's not just about the little house here, it's about all the you know this, just the bigger picture I'm like, ah, that makes sense, that's good.
Speaker 1:And when the schools start closing and different counties, you're like, okay, this is getting pretty serious. So we need to, you know, make sure we're watching this thing. And we did. We watched it to death right, because you never knew what would happen, because you know I think it was Irma or something last year the one just took a, you know, just a right turn before Tampa, and you know, and they had better.
Speaker 2:They had better been ready for it.
Speaker 1:And you just, it's all you can do. The good news is you have time with the hurricane and you see some of the tracks. You just you need to be prepared and be ready.
Speaker 2:Hope you all enjoyed that episode. If you can, sharing the podcast goes a really long way. If you enjoyed this episode or if you know someone who might enjoy this episode, please pass it along to them. I would really appreciate the support. Until next time, catch you on the Flippity Dibbity Dop.