As a group, the Keystone community is known for taking control of its own destiny, its civic association a powerful force of more than 4,200 homes just across the Hillsborough County line.
But a town hall gathering this week will ask those same residents to take control of a different kind — one that involves their own home.
The “Get Ready and Take Control” conference is set for May 22 beginning at 6:30 p.m., designed for residents to be ready when bad things happen.
“We cover 32 square miles, and we have an awful lot of wooded area,” said Tom Aderhold, president of the Keystone Civic Association, who is helping to organize the event. “We have a lot of woods, a lot of lakes, and a lot of opportunity for misfortune to befall somebody. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
It’s not that Keystone isn’t safe. It’s just that life in this rural area between the smaller metropolis that is Tampa and the growth of Pasco County faces challenges its neighbors don’t.
For instance, children can get lost in the woods. Boaters and swimmers can have accidents in the lakes. Even encounters with the local wildlife can be troublesome.
And even with Pasco on a fast path to growth, residents there also face some of the same issues, which is why everyone — whether they live within Keystone or not — is invited to come out, Aderhold said.
“Public services are slow to get to us, so sometimes we have to be ready to help ourselves,” he said.
In the past, civic association and community leaders have worked with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and other first-responder agencies to make the community more self-sufficient. That included making an inventory of the kind of equipment individual homeowners already have that could be made available in an emergency, and now there is about $400,000 worth at their disposal.
Keystone also created citizen-led patrols led not by a car, but instead horses.
“Keystone has one of the largest horse populations in the state of Florida,” Aderhold said. “We told the county that we don’t want any of your cars, we’ll just do it on horseback. And it’s neat when you get a whole bunch of people together doing these sort of things.”
The meeting Thursday has two parts. The Keystone Citizen Corps & Emergency Operations Plan group is leading the first, designed specifically for homeowners. It doesn’t matter who built a home or when, houses are vulnerable to events like storms. But they don’t have to be.
“We have a woman coming in from Florida Emergency Management Services from Tallahassee to do a workshop showing homeowners how they can walk parts of their home and identify the five components that need the most attention,” Aderhold said. They are water barriers, whole house anchoring, gable ends, window openings and doorways.
“We have building codes in Florida, and builders build right to those codes. But they can decay or deteriorate over time,” Aderhold said. “We’ll have some retrofit specialists available as well to help homeowners.”
The second part of the conference is a town hall-style presentation dealing with a number of issues like crime, burglary, identity theft, hazards and dangers at work and at home, and sudden property damage from natural or man-made events.
This portion will include information from a variety of different groups including Residential Mitigation and Security, Neighborhood Watch, Hillsborough County Citizen Patrol, the Community Emergency Response Team, Medical Reserve Corp, and even the Amateur Radio Emergency Services team.
“They are an essential component of the emergency operations center,” Aderhold said of those radio operators. “When public communications go down, the ham radio operators have a huge network already in place, so they can be there communicating when others can’t.”
The conference will take place at Keystone Park, 17928 Gunn Highway, and the public is invited.
To get more information, call Tom Aderhold at (813) 968-6866.
Published May 21, 2014
