NICEVILLE — Gulf Power is busy making preparations for hurricane season now less than a month away.
About 60 Gulf Power employees from almost every department attended the utility company’s annual storm drill Friday at the Okaloosa County Emergency Operations Center.
“We prep year-round for a storm and every year we set aside a day for a drill,” Gulf Power spokesman Jeff Rogers said. “Today’s a little bit different. We’ve switched focus to our customers and how we can better serve customers during a storm or a power outage.
“We’re learning how to better work with the EOC, how to better serve our customers, and the bottom line is to help us be able to restore power more quickly to our customers,” Rogers added.
Friday was the first time Gulf Power has held its annual drill at Okaloosa County’s EOC, which opened at Northwest Florida State College in December 2010. If the region does have a tropical storm or hurricane this year, Gulf Power will have two employees stationed at every county EOC in its service area.
“We wanted to get a real feel for what goes on at the EOC,” Rogers said. “I think the lessons we learn here we can take throughout our service footprint, work with other EOCs and help all of our customers.”
The drill featured a mock disaster of Gulf Power’s corporate headquarters in Pensacola being damaged in a storm. That happened during Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and employees had to be relocated.
Gulf Power gives every worker a storm assignment that may or may not have anything to do with their day-to-day duties.
John Rickard, director of NWF State’s physical plant, talked about how Gulf Power and the college have helped each other in the past and can continue to do so.
After previous storms when the power has been out and local gas stations have been closed, Rickard said the college has let Gulf Power’s repair trucks fuel up there to stay on the road.
Rickard also talked about some of the challenges NWF State faces after a storm. He said the college typically doesn’t bring staff and students back immediately after power is restored because officials know they are vulnerable to more outages.
He said the school works closely with Gulf Power to know when the power grid is more stable.
“The last thing I want to do is get a college full of students and staff back in here and have that system go back down, and then we’re sending them scattering again,” Rickard said.
“Getting the students returning to class is important,” he added. “We’ve got to get back in operation. I think everybody, whether it’s Gulf Power, Okaloosa County, the public schools or anyone else, the sooner you get everybody back to regular business, everybody starts to get a little more comfortable.”
Hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.
Contact Daily News Business Editor Dusty Ricketts at 850-315-4448 or dricketts@nwfdailynews.com. Follow him on Twitter @DustyRnwfdn.