Township of Brick Hurricane Sandy Fair

Well, to say we were not prepared we were prepared to deal with it but I don't think anyone was psychologically prepared for the amount of devastation that occurred in such a short period of time. 

Brick Township came to FEMA requesting some assistance to develop a community fair, so that their residents were able to get the straight answers from all of the different agencies in their recovery support. 

I was very confident that this was the proper place to hold it. That we had enough room. Somehow or another when people registered to attend it was almost an even breakout of how many attended each session. You know, and we were thinking "Oh we're gonna have more at the first session" and I think we had more at the last session. I don't think we could have planned that any better. 

My name is Steve Acropolis. I'm the Mayor here in Brick Township. I want to for those of you that don't know me or haven't thrown anything at me yet. I want to thank a couple of people first off for putting this really together. I want to thank kinda my storm czar and that's Juan Belleu. Also at this point obviously I'd like to thank the Chief for being here and what he's done. Scott Pezarus our business administrator, Debbie my assistant in my office that many of you have talked to. And the FEMA people and the SBA that are here I kinda put them all together. They're here because we've asked them to be here. 

We were able to provide our experts to work with the Township experts as they delivered information and  provided the community with information. 

So when you're done here listening to this you're gonna be able to go to each of these classrooms that you received a form with and you're gonna be able to sit with those people and ask as many questions as you want and get as many answers as you want and if you don't get those answers, find a township employee or myself and we will help you get those answers, if an answer, can be given. 

You know I thought it was really important for us to get information to our residents as quickly as possible; and get them the right information. 

So, we looked at a number of different ways to try and get the information to them. Whether it would be neighborhood meetings over a period of several nights. And we came to the conclusion that a fair type setting with a main area to talk to them give some initial information and then break out sessions or different, in this case, classrooms in our high school, so that people can get information directly one-on-one from a FEMA representative and then sometimes they believe the people with FEMA on their shirt or their jacket as opposed to maybe the municipalities. So that was the biggest issue is trying to get information to our residents as quickly as possible. 

It required a substantial devotion of resources from FEMA. In fact, we had in excess of 70 people participating in this. We actually served more than 1500 people. And the community who had questions about mitigation, individual assistance, and with the Small Business Administration. 

We met with them two weeks ago. We had talked about doing 18 different communities, they said that this fair situation would be a better event. And I have to say that they were correct. I am very happy with the way it turned out. A lot of  information was given. Maybe people didn't like that information but it was. Information is key to people to make a decision going forward in their life. 

I think it went well, I think for us for the first time having something like this happen. I think that I got a lot of positive feedback from residents thanking us for doing it. You know you're doing a good job those types of things. There are a couple of things, you know I think maybe in the beginning we would have maybe taking a couple more questions in the general session as opposed to letting them go as quick as we did. And maybe some things where we might put some people on stage. 

But I believe that having it the way we did it was probably the best way. It's not perfect. But it's probably as close to perfect as we could get it. 

I think we got the best of the best from FEMA today.