Hurricane Irene hasn’t downed the first tree or flooded a single street on the U.S. mainland yet, but dozens of disaster response coordinators were already hunkered down Friday morning at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Regional Response Coordinating Center in DeKalb County.
Center director George Yearwood said the facility, in an office building on Chamblee Tucker Road, went into “Phase 1” activation three days ago, with over 100 personnel on each of two 12-hour shifts representing the military, other federal agencies such as the Department of Transportation and civilian relief organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army.
Vic Jones is on the Hurricane Liaison Team at the center. He said his job was to “try to advise these folks who are prestaging people and equipment and food, to help them determine where is a safe place to put your people and your assets so it won’t be damaged by the storm.”
The center, which handles the federal response to disasters in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and the Carolinas, has already dispatched supplies and support personnel to North Carolina, where Irene is expected to make landfall around midday on Saturday.
“We have to be prepared because the wind will approach before landfall and it becomes a dangerous situation to move people,” Yearwood told the AJC. “We want to get support into place 48 hours before.”
Jones said problems could begin along the North Carolina coast well ahead of landfall, and continue for some time.
“It’s a big storm with a lot of wind, but it’s going to have a lot of rain associated with it,” Jones said. “When you have a lot of rain over a period of time, it causes a lot of problems.”
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