With severe weather season approaching, the Clarke County Emergency Management Agency is providing the community with another way to receive information on emergencies and the weather through the Hyper-Reach system.
“If you go on the website and sign up, then you can decide what types of alerts you get. Like if you want tornado watches and warnings but not thunderstorm warnings, then you can specify that,” explained EMA Director David Sharp. “You pick and choose what you want and how you want to receive it. I can send some information out manually, like if there is an emergency with a bridge out or missing person or anything. I can set a radius for an area, and it will automatically call all the house phones in that area that are signed up and notify them of what I need them to know. I can also send out county wide messages if I need to. The weather alerts are automatically generated, so I don’t personally send them out. We can do text messages, phone calls, email, or any mixture of those. To sign up, people can go to the website, call the number, or go on the Clarke County EMA Facebook page and scan an image that is on there that should take them directly to it.”
The Hyper-Reach system is already paid for and will not charge a fee for anyone to sign up.
“It is free,” declared Sharp. “The supervisors agreed to pay for this service, and right now we have a contract for two years. Once that is up, we’re looking at doing a four year contract so that it coincides with the supervisors’ time in office.”
To sign up for Hyper-Reach, people can call 601-768-1730 or go to bit.ly/ClarkeAlerts to sign up.
They are trying to prepare for the bad weather today and want the residents in the county to be prepared for anything when the storms begin approaching.
“The problem is you have a line of storms that is moving across the state, but out in front of that are super cells that pop up. That’s where you get most of your tornadoes,” informed Sharp. “You could have an area hit by a tornado and then an hour or two later have that line come across and experience 70 mph winds. Right now we’re expecting all modes of severe weather: torrential rain, hail, high winds, and possible tornadoes. What they had in Texas recently is what we usually are looking at the possibility of having in a few days. They’ve had some long tracking tornadoes. If you get one of those, most likely it will be about an EF2 or greater. An EF2 has at least 125 mph wind, so anything above that is on up there.”
Strong winds and tornadoes aren’t the only thing that residents need to be aware of with the storms of today.
“With the amounts of rain we get, there’s the potential to have flash flooding. That is a reality today,” continued Sharp. “If water is across the road, don’t drive into. Turn around because it doesn’t take a whole lot to wash a vehicle off the road. If there are barricades on roads, don’t drive around them. In residential areas, trucks driving around the barricades create waves that could push the water into people’s houses.”
The EMA office does have some supplies to help homeowners who may need to create barricades to keep water out of their homes in case of flash flooding during bad weather.
“We already have a bale of sandbags and a load of sand in our parking lot. It’s there and free for the taking,” expressed Sharp. “People can come get what they need. If we run out of bags, then I have more in reserve I can pull out and put out there. If we run out of sand, then I’ll get the dump truck over here with another load of sand.”
EMA officials are prepared to handle any emergency created with today’s weather, and they will be on site ready to respond throughout the extent of the storm times.
