Lowndes County preps for hurricane season with new emergency notification system

• Lowndes County has replaced its 17-year-old emergency notification system, CodeRed, with the new AlertLowndes.
• Valdosta saw heavy damage from previous storms, removing over 260,000 cubic yard of debris from Idalia.
• Watch the video to see how neighbors and officials are preparing.

BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT

You may remember Diane Sanderbeck.

"I did not like being without power for five hours, five days rather. That was hard."

She's one of many neighbors I've gotten to know through tracking storm recovery in Valdosta.

She and her neighbors off of Lakeview have been hit multiple times, first with Idalia, then the storms in April.

"My neighbor on the West side. His trees fell and hit my house and my fence."

She was spared from serious damage during Debby a few weeks ago, but the back-to-back storms has her on alert.

"We did have power outage in this neighborhood for about, I guess it was about 24 hours. So it was a little miserable, but yeah. I'm planning on getting a whole house generator."

And she's not the only one prepping for peak hurricane season.

Lowndes County's emergency notification system, CodeRed, has been officially retired, with AlertLowndes now in it's place.

With AlertLowndes, people can get emergency alerts by phone, text, and email. Plus, they can answer quick poll questions to give county officials crucial info during emergencies.

This come after their adoption of CrisisTrack, a damage assessment software app that also helps officials and neighbors with post-storm damage assessments..

"Code Reds a little over 17 years old and so Alert Lowndes just allows us to have more capabilities and to better communicate with our residents."

Meghan Barwick, county information officer, tells me now the time for neighbors to prepare if they haven't.

And Diane, is ahead of schedule.

"It's tough sometimes and i think it's tougher on the younger people because when you get my age it just is what it is you know you can't fight it."

Damage from Debby is looking to be around $1-$2 billion. Something to think about as we head into peak hurricane season.