Local residents weren’t the only ones preparing for Hurricane Ian on Tuesday.
Crews from the city and county’s public works departments have been making storm preparation efforts as well.
Tuesday morning, during a county meeting, Assistant County Manager Kevin Kirby provided county officials and local constitutional officers with an update on how county crews were prepping for the storm.
Kirby said that county crews were pumping down all county-owned retention ponds in case of a heavy rain-related event. The county also began offering sandbags Tuesday to residents and workers were preparing to go to split-shift schedule to handle storm-related needs.
Within the City of Lake City, storm preparation efforts have also become a top priority, with numerous crews traveling through local neighborhoods addressing any issues that could potentially turn into problems during a storm.
Steve Brown, the city’s interim public works director, said crews began their storm preparation efforts on Monday morning by preparing sandbags.
“We’ve been going throughout problem areas that we know have low lying areas cleaning storm drains,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “We’ve been to other neighborhoods to ensure we can minimize flooding to the best of our ability.”
Brown said the city’s plan is to continue storm preparation efforts until the storm is “actually on us.”
He said there are some additional things crews will work toward as the storm approaches.
“We’ll be performing maintenance on our equipment to ensure that all of our equipment is in good working order — our loaders to make sure we can get trees and debris out of the way and keep roadways open and any type of emergency-related stuff,” he said. “I just hope the storm preparation effort goes our way.”