Jackson County ready for hurricane season, official says
Print- •
-
Share
- Share this item
-
Grab the link
Copy and paste the link:
- Blog about it
- Close
- •
-
Post a Comment
- •
Favorite- •
Emergency contact number during a hurricane
Jackson County Sheriff's Office: 782-3541
EDNA - The remodeling of Jackson County's Emergency Operation Center will enable city and county officials to stay abreast of hurricane news and communicate with state officials if a hurricane were projected to hit the county, the emergency management coordinator said.
"You have to have something a group of people can see and a group of people can hear," said Allan Friedrich, Jackson County emergency management coordinator. "We will be able to project the webinars up to the courtroom, so people would be able to see them."
The 2008 hurricane season was the first time state officials broadcast updates via Internet video conferences to county and city emergency management officials up and down Texas' Gulf Coast, Friedrich said. Last year, city and county officials met in a small room near the sheriff's office for the updates, Friedrich said.
"Beginning with Ike last year, they started doing the webinars for county and city leaders," Friedrich said.
The county's emergency operation center has only been in existence for 15 years, and a major storm has not passed through the county in that time, Friedrich said.
Many of the buildings that would be used after a hurricane as staging locations for cleanup efforts are newer than that and have not been tested by a major storm yet, said Friedrich, who has been the county's emergency services coordinator for 13 years.
Emergency management officials monitor storms from the time they form off the coast of Africa, Friedrich said.
"We're not in full mode when it's on the coast of Africa, but when it hits the Gulf, you can bet your boots we are," Friedrich said.
The county has four levels of readiness when preparing for storms. Level three, the second lowest alert level, will go into effect June 1, the beginning of hurricane season.
Emergency services would then raise the level to two or one, the highest alert levels, as a hurricane is more likely to make landfall near the county.
"The formula we use to determine the level is based on the position of storm, the distance from the center of the storm to hurricane force winds and tropical force winds and the speed of the storm," Friedrich said.
All county property can be boarded, secured and ready for a hurricane in less than six hours, Friedrich said.
"We have the material on hand, and we've trained the precinct crews. They know where to go and what to do," Friedrich said. "When they first started training, it took six weeks to do everything. Now, we've got it down to six hours."
