I spoke with the mayor of orange beach this morning about the problems surrounding the search this past weekend for owen black an 8 year old autustic child who went missing on the Al/fl line Friday night. Mayor Kennon confirmed my fears and so i am posting here what the escambia county sherriff and esc failed so miserably to do.
1 escambia county refused ALL offers of help from OB.
2. Even though OB has the highest rated dive team in alabama sheriff morgan sent for the evergreen dive team rather than ob.
3. Esc county failed in putting out an amber alert on the key. Virtually no condo owners knew of the missing 8 year old.
4. Failed to utilize oba s EXTENSIVE search and rescue teams in fact ordered them to stand down on the fl side.
5 failed to coordinate a unified search and rescue utilizing all the. Available assets.
6. Failed to get ingress egress orders on condo properties, search teams were at the mercy of whether or not a condo would consent to w search of their property.
I could continue but it becomes apparant that even with the life of a child in the balance escambia county failed to have in place the kind of planning one would expect in an all out effort to save a child.
Anyone on the key who helped can attest to the bungling of esc county. It is simply appalling how disorganized and inept esc county is.
As a result oba has asked for a meeting with esc county to see if their can be a unified plan on emergencies agreed upon.
To our dive team and oba responders credit according to mayor kennan when their was an evident need and cause to assist they ignored morgans dictates and were utilized by esc ground personnel . Apparantley they had no problem with any offers of help. If what our mayor says is true and i believe him the governor should launch an investigation into morgans motives and actions.
While all this is true in escambia county the almost exact opposite is true in ob. Mayor tony confirmed our judge stood ready to issue a blanket search warrant, we did issue an amber alert here, and ob will accept any outside help with missing children
Nuff said