Mississippi Power disaster directors prepare for 2024 hurricane season

GULFPORT, Miss. (WDAM) – Administrators at Mississippi Power are getting ready for hurricane season.

Tuesday, disaster directors from across the Mississippi Power service area gathered at the company’s Operations Center in Gulfport to go over their response plans for the 2024 tropical storm season.

“We continually refine our plans, we strive to be a learning organization,” said Stephen Schruff, storm director for Mississippi Power. “So today is about sharing some learnings from last year that we’ve incorporated, discuss any gaps we have and work together as a team to improve those gaps. And then, we’ll have some learnings that we’ll take back to our teams and share as we prepare for hurricane season.”

About three dozen people took part in the annual meeting.

They say they are ready to meet customer needs after a hurricane and are hoping customers are also focused on staying safe if a storm strikes.

“In the event of a storm, I would tell [our customers] to always go out to our website, look at our outage map and make sure that they’re keeping up with the outages and continue to communicate with us,” said Cedrick Hurd, division manager at Mississippi Power. “But when we’re out and about, I would also encourage them to stay away from any downed power lines, stay away from any trees, because a lot of that stuff is dangerous, and just make sure they’re making the right contact to us to take care of that.”

The Gulfport Operations Center opened in 2008.

Want more WDAM 7 news in your inbox? Click here to subscribe to our newsletter.

Copyright 2024 WDAM. All rights reserved.