Florida & the Caribbean. Days after Harvey, Irma forced one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history. Task forces saved or assisted thousands across two theaters.
Hurricane Irma struck in early September 2017, only days after Harvey's catastrophic flooding in Texas. Florida ordered evacuations for a record 6.8 million people and sheltered a peak of nearly 191,764 in close to 700 shelters, one of the largest sheltering missions in U.S. history.
Irma forced the national system to run concurrent operations. While teams were still committed to Harvey, task forces moved into Florida and the Caribbean. Reporting from the season credits US&R teams with roughly 1,141 rescues in the Caribbean and over a thousand lives saved or assisted in Florida during the Irma response.
Across the full 2017 season, Harvey, Irma, and Maria together, FEMA urban search and rescue task forces saved or assisted nearly 9,500 lives. At the height of concurrent operations, all 28 task forces were committed. That figure is the system operating at its absolute ceiling, and it is the clearest evidence that demand can spike faster than any single team can absorb.
Irma shows why the number of ready caches matters. When two or three major events land in the same window, there is no slack. Every staged, maintained, deployable cache is one more capability that does not have to be conjured from nothing in the middle of a crisis.
Every deployment on this page ran on equipment that had to be owned, maintained, and ready before the call. Project Cache exists to make that equipment understandable, and to put it in the field. Explore the Mission Ready Packages →