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And people will say, you guys fared so well because you were inland. The FEMA maps showed that the most windy area was Cayo Costa where the storm came aboard with sustained ground level winds at 130. We were at 120. So yes, we were inland, but we had nine hours of over a hundred mile-per- hour winds on top of us. We were in the eye- wall. We never got the eye of the storm. So it was challenging. I had multiple families that had evacuated to my house. I had nine adults, five kids, four dogs and a cat, all in my house. We’re sitting there in the living room and we had pulled a bunch of chairs in and my sliding glass doors are bowing in and out and they’re hitting the back of my chair and hitting the back of my chair, so I keep moving my chair, and \[they keep\] hitting the back of my chair. As an engineer, I was confident we were go- ing to be okay. And we were. We never lost power, we never lost internet, we never lost water. Our sewage treatment plant kept go- ing. It was as if nothing happened, besides the fact that there was a good ten hours of these crazy winds. How did we do this? How did we make a community that didn’t have any of the issues the Tri-County area had? Before we started designing and developing the town, we went back to 1940 aerials and looked at how did water move on this site before agricul- ture was a significant impact, and we were able to identify flow ways and restore those flow ways. We know if you try to fight mother nature, you are going to lose. So we used Mother Nature to restore those flow ways. In addition, because we wanted storm safety and we wanted the ability to shelter in place, we had to look at things like power. And so we have 150 megawatt photovoltaic array that can power about 30,000 houses. 660,000 panels that covers 880 acres of land. The other important component is the hardening of the infrastructure. Florida Power and Light has been replacing their wooden poles with con- crete poles which can withstand 200 mile-per-hour wind loads. We also added battery backup so we can store power, and we are also tied to a natural gas plant. So during the day we’re getting energy from the sun. At night we discharge the batteries and then of course, when needed, we pull from the natural gas plant. Our substation and our water utility, it’s hardened and it’s raised, but what we did find when we debriefed was our weak point was that substa- tion, because if lightning had hit that substation, we would not have had power. So we’re in the process of adding a second substation so that we can again reroute power, if needed. The concept of resiliency is not putting your eggs in one basket. Having solar, having battery, having gas powered electricity gave us that. Making sure that we had additional infrastructure by adding this second substa- tion will ensure we don’t lose power. And all of our communications are underground. When we looked at how to handle storm water, we first restored those natural flow ways. We also restored wetlands because wetlands have a great capacity to hold water. In addition to that, we have a connected lake system, and the ability to monitor the level of those lakes; we are now adding pump systems so pre-storm we can pump the lakes down so that we have additional capacity. Now, specific to the design is that the finished floor elevation of each house and building is two feet above the crest of road, because if we were to fill all of our stormwater systems, the lakes would overflow between the houses and intentionally flood the roads to preserve the buildings. We did have damage, but less than $500,000. FEMA came the next week and reported back that the storm had missed us. But the real story was that the storm hadn’t missed us. We had done all of these things to build in resil- ience and redundancy so that we could handle the storm. Bart Dalton Wilmington, DE SUMMER 2023 JOURNAL 24 We use native vegetation. We looked at what was onsite and created a plant pallet from that because clearly, all of those plants had withstood multiple storms.