surrounded by water
Judy HillFor those of you who don’t know Jack Espinosa, it’s your loss.
No. I’m not talking about the judge, but the judge’s father.
The senior Espinosa, who is much older than me, is a renaissance man. He has been a comedian, nightclub performer, teacher, fencing master and longtime spokesman for the Hillsborough County sheriff’s office.
He has always been amazingly witty and funny.
Kind, too, although he usually won’t cop to that.
When I began writing columns for The Tampa Tribune, back in the last century, Espinosa took me to lunch one day to “educate” me, a life-long St. Petersburg resident, about Tampa, which may be Florida’s most colorful city and is certainly more richly textured than my home town.
He told me about bolita and the mob and the Italians and the Spaniards and the early immigrants from Cuba and Ybor City, all of which I already knew about but I didn’t tell him because he’s so much fun to listen to.
As I recall, we had lunch at the Colonnade Restaurant on Bayshore Boulevard. Driving back to The Tribune building, we passed Tampa General Hospital on Davis Islands.
Espinosa nodded his head towards the buildings and said, “Only in Tampa would the major health care facility be built on a spit of land surrounded by water. WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN IN A HURRICANE????? How you gonna get to it? ”
Thank God, we’ve yet to find out “what’s gonna happen in a hurricane?” But New Orleans has, so it’s noteworthy that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a k a FEMA has given TGH $3.2 million to fortify the area’s only Level One trauma center.
That will go a long way towards making the facility safer.
Hopefully.
Maybe.
But given that the hospital is pretty much an island unto itself, Hillsborough emergency manager Larry Gispert worries about its isolation almost as much as he worries about its vulnerability to wind and storm surge.
Or, in Espinosa’s words, “How you gonna get to it?”
Hospital spokesman John Dunn said that the hospital could operate without help for about five days.
Facilities manager Oslec Fernandez said that the new parking garage has been reinforced so that the roof can hold Chinook helicopters, the largest in the military rescue fleet.
Are you reassured?
For more unanswerable questions, visit www.judyhillonline.com.
Loading ...
June 12th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
3.2 million??? FEMA could have granted 32 million and the likelihood of fortifying Tampa General to the extent that it would survive a high category hurricane is still pretty slim. Wouldn’t a better use of the funds be to invest in realistic, quality studies of what’s REALLY going to happen when the Cat 5 hits the area and how we’re going to realistically evacuate and respond to the ensuing aftermath? Have we learned nothing from the egregious behavior of the so-called leadership that was in place in New Orleans?
June 12th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
so good to see you on sticks, judy, where we can still appreciate your tell it like it is journalism. yeah!!
as for a hurricane, let’s get real. would any of YOU want to be in a hospital completely cut off with floodwaters filling the bottom floor? the big one would require evacuating the hospital, i would think
June 12th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
remember the patients and doctors and nurses at the new orleans hospitals? let’s see, suffering, starvation, desperation, death. no, that’s not where i would want to be, at TGH. or anywhere in pinellas, for that matter, when the big one hits here
April 24th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
[...] on the right called The Colonnade. PULL IN! You are in for a treat. Mentioned briefly in a 2007 Sticks column by Judy Hill, the Colonnade Restaurant has been a Tampa mainstay for the last 70 years, yet seems to [...]