VALDOSTA — The people most likely to be affected by a hurricane — the emergency responders, medical personnel and utility crews — were represented at the 2024 Hurricane Awareness Meeting May 22 at the historic Lowndes County Courthouse.

Ashley Tye, the county Emergency Management Agency director, said it was the largest such gathering since they started holding them, and there was no wonder: It’s been less than nine months since the county experienced a hurricane firsthand, and other weather incidents have struck since then.

“We’re not dealing with hurricane amnesia. We’re dealing with hurricane fatigue,” National Weather Service Director Kelly Godsey told the assembly.

The upcoming hurricane season starts June 1, and Godsey’s preview offered little hope for things to get better.

Last year, the major forecasters predicted fewer than the 20 named storms that actually occurred, Godsey said. This year’s predictions are higher than last year’s were — ranging from 14 to 23 named storms, 7-12 hurricanes and 3-5 major hurricanes, depending on which of five different forecasting groups you’re looking at.

Despite 2023’s level of activity, only seven of those 20 storms made it to hurricane strength and only one of those hurricanes made landfall.

“But for us it was a pretty active hurricane season,” Tye said, because that one — Hurricane Idalia — came right through Lowndes County.

At least three factors are converging to make the hurricane season look more dangerous than usual, Godsey said:

— A La Niña weather event is expected to form in the Pacific Ocean in late summer. Hurricanes are more frequent when there’s a La Niña, he said, because it pushes the jet stream north. The jet stream creates wind shear that will tend to tear storms apart in the Atlantic Ocean, but if it’s too far north the wind shear isn’t where the storm is forming so the storm can get bigger.

— The water in the Atlantic basin is warmer than it usually is this time of year. Warm water fuels tropical storms and hurricanes.

— South Georgia has already received more rain than is typical for this time of year. The ground is 95% saturated, Godsey said, citing NASA satellite data. It takes less force to uproot a tree in wet soil, so while it typically takes a 60 mph wind to blow down a pine tree, for instance, in wet soil the tree will fall from a lesser wind speed. Falling trees do damage in their own right, but they’re also a major culprit for damage to power lines and other infrastructure needed for recovery.

Hearing Godsey’s prediction was only part of the reason for the meeting. The other reason was to touch base with the people who would be responding in the event of severe weather and ensure they knew what to do.

Tye told the gathering that having a plan is essential — but just as important is that everyone knows what that plan is. During Idalia, the emergency services had a plan that relied on certain people to do certain things, but those people, whose main jobs were outside the emergency response field, didn’t know they were supposed to do those things.

In an interview after the meeting, Tye said other lessons from Idalia involved communications. He said they did a good job getting information out before the storm and during it too, but they didn’t adequately prepare the community for the recovery process. He said they’ve worked to improve their plan for getting information out after a disaster.

He said a big challenge during the hurricane was when both cell service and the internet were knocked out. Responders had a hard time communicating then, he said. There were backups, but Idalia took out the backups. Since then, emergency responders have worked on other ways to communicate — he called them “backups to the backups.”

Volunteer groups were a huge benefit in the recovery, Tye said, but coordinating them was a challenge the EMA hadn’t prepared for. Since Idalia, the EMA has partnered with smaller volunteer groups through a Community Organization for Action in Disasters, which helped get assistance to areas hit by straight-line winds in late March.

Through COAD and other planning efforts, Tye believes the EMA can distribute assistance more evenly through the community so that volunteers aren’t clustered in one area while another doesn’t get help that it needs.

“We don’t want anybody to be underserved,” he said.

One thing that did work well during Idalia, he said, was the relationships among the EMA, the cities, the county, the emergency services and the utility companies. The groups had been working on those relationships for years beforehand, he said. “They proved their worth during Idalia,” he said.