After watching hurricanes Helene and Milton rack up as much as $300,000 in damage to a single city building in 2024, Bradenton Beach is trying something refreshingly simple: spend a little now to avoid paying a lot more later.
The city has installed a Tiger Dam system at its public works building, a barrier made of large water-filled tubes that city crews can lay across doorways to hold back storm surge. The cost was about $27,000, covered through FEMA mitigation funding — a fraction of the damage the last two storms caused to the same building.
Mayor John Chappie said the public works building, located next to the Bradenton Beach Police Department, took a serious hit during the 2024 storms. He estimated the damage to the building, its contents and stored equipment at between $250,000 and $300,000 — a bill that a modest, proactive investment could have gone a long way toward preventing.
The math isn’t complicated: a barrier costing a fraction of the previous damage total, deployable by public works staff in a matter of hours when a storm approaches, protecting a facility that turned out to be more than just a maintenance building during the crisis.
That’s because when Helene and Milton hit, the police department next door became a lifeline for residents. ChrisAnn Allen, later promoted to the department’s public information officer, spent those days fielding a steady stream of calls from people looking for help with everything from comfort stations to Salvation Army meal service.
“I mean, basically helped in every way that doesn’t involve being a police officer,” Allen said.
Allen, a lifelong Bradenton Beach resident, didn’t mince words about how the 2024 season compared to anything she’d seen before.
“The level that we dealt with, with those two storms, with Helene and Milton, was not comparable to anything previous in my lifetime,” she said.
City officials say this is only the first step. Bradenton Beach is now pursuing a separate grant to install floodgates along Bridge Street, aimed at protecting local businesses from the next major storm rather than leaving them to absorb the cost after the fact.
For a small coastal city working within a tight budget, the approach on display here is straightforward: cheap prevention now instead of an expensive rebuild later, funded through existing federal disaster mitigation dollars rather than new local taxes or debt.
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