The lieutenant brought the beer. Then he covered the camera with a red party cup.

On Monday, the city of North Bay Village released video showing the commander of the city's hurricane emergency-response team bringing beer into City Hall on the eve of Hurricane Irma's landfall last September.

After lugging in a white cooler that witnesses say was full of Corona Light, Lt. James McCready can be seen on the surveillance video attempting to cover the security camera with a red plastic party cup.

The video footage accompanied an internal-affairs report, obtained through a Miami Herald records request last week, detailing how half of the twelve-person emergency-response unit drank Coronas while on duty on Sept. 9, 2017, as trees fell and streets flooded the night before Hurricane Irma made landfall. Officers were encouraged to drink by their commander, even though they were the only emergency unit still on the ground.

All six officers who participated in the party received letters of reprimand and lost accrued time. McCready was removed from the hurricane “Landfall Team.”

Two weeks after the Miami Herald filed a records request, and more than a week after the internal affairs report was released, North Bay Village released a crudely redacted video. That was also just shy of two weeks after the same footage was first aired on June 27 by South Florida's NBC 6. But city officials claim that tape was leaked to NBC 6 and the redacted file did not already exist in their system. They justified the delay to the Herald's request on the grounds that officers' faces must be blurred out of the tape.

This story was originally published July 9, 2018 at 5:30 PM.