hurricane season
The spring of tornadoes and floods has made Mississippi and Alabama more prepared for the summer hurricane season, rather than stretching their resources too thin, emergency directors said Friday.

The tornadoes that hit Alabama on April 27 - part of a four-day outbreak that killed more than 300 people in the South and Midwest - showed an emergency preparedness gap created by the state's largest deployment ever of National Guard troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, said Art Faulkner, director of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

The National Weather Service said 58 tornadoes touched down in Alabama, killing more than 230 people and injuring thousands. Put together, emergency management officials say the twisters left a path of destruction 10 miles wide and 610 miles long, or about as far as a drive from Birmingham to Columbus, Ohio.

Alabama had to enter private contracts for engineering and transportation work normally done by the guard, Faulkner said.

Mike Womack, head of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, said, "hurricane exercises are one thing - but if you have to respond to an actual emergency, it makes you more capable to respond to the next one."

He and other emergency preparedness officials spoke as the annual Gulf States Hurricane Conference wound up in New Orleans on Friday.

Womack said all the agency's equipment is in good shape, and it has replaced food and other resources used in the tornado response.

The flood response is still going on - people are just starting to return home in areas where their homes have been flooded for a month, he said.

"Fortunately, our legislature understands the need to spend state dollars to be prepared," Womack said. "We're responsible for our own preparation. FEMA can help afterward."

It's local preparedness that gives the Federal Emergency Management Agency the ability to respond to disaster after disaster around the country, including tornadoes in Massachusetts, floods in Vermont and New York, wildfires across the Southwest, flooding in Montana and tsunami damage in Hawaii, California and Oregon, said FEMA administrator Craig Fugate.

"It gives us the flexibility to deal with multiple significant events across the country and still be able to respond to the next disaster," he said.

The 125 members of Louisiana's first statewide urban search and rescue team got their first team experience in Tuscaloosa, Ala., after the tornadoes there, said Mark Cooper, director of the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, such teams came to Louisiana from as far afield as New York and California.

"Our team has been doing training and exercises over the last two years," he said. "But this is real life. Now we are able to help our sister state."

Source: The Associated Press