NATCHEZ — With reminders of Gustav still littering the Miss-Lou, local officials have had a chance to reflect on the how the storm was handled.

The consensus? Job well done.

While the area’s leaders and first responders said there’s always room to improve in any disaster, they all said the response to Gustav was great.

Natchez Mayor Jake Middleton said he was pleased with the response.

“It was handled wonderfully, couldn’t have handled it any better,” he said. “Everybody was personable and wanting to know what they could do to help, you just couldn’t ask for more assistance.”

And in coordinating the well-handled effort both Middleton and president of the Adams County Board of Supervisors Henry Watts gave a great deal of credit to Stan Owens.

Owens is Adams County’s Emergency Management Director, and both men credited Owens for his ability to organize the city and the county before and after the storm.

“Stan did an excellent job of keeping us all informed through the whole thing,” Watts said.

Owens said the first step in readying the city and the county was to ready his own office by organizing things like tools, generators and volunteers.

“At the same time I began to contact the police department, fire department and Red Cross,” he said.

In the days just before Gustav, Owens conducted a series of meetings that incorporated multiple entities and allowed Owens to hear from community leaders.

Watts said he thought the meetings had a “calming effect” and let community leaders know what to expect.

Owens and several others credited those meetings with keeping things running smoothly during the storm.

But Owens still sees areas of improvement.

“Communication is always an issue,” he said.

Owens saw room for improvement in the allocation of resources.

“One of the main issues was that most of the state resources were aimed at the Mississippi Gulf Coast when it was very apparent Southwest Mississippi was a target. I understand the coast has to be prepared but we’re here, too.”

Owens said in the future he will also address delegation of responsibilities.

“We’re going to change some things,” he said.

Owens said he plans to use the National Incident Management System more in the future.

NIMS helps to organize tiers of management in the event of a disaster.

“If I would have used it a little more in-depth, the incident would have been a lot smoother,” he said.

Adams County Sheriff Ronny Brown said he also thought the community was ready for the storm but did see room for some improvement.

Brown said since the entire area lost power it was not possible to use local gas stations to refuel response vehicles.

Brown said he would urge station owners to purchase generators that would allow their pumps to be used when the power is out.

Brown said if it were not for the gas pump at the sheriff’s office that is powered by a generator, it would have been extremely difficult to provide gas to response vehicles.

And those unusable pumps were a symptom of a county-wide power outage that caught many off guard.

Entergy’s customer service manager Stephen Caruthers said the entire county lost power when the five transmission lines that bring power to the county all went down.

Even still, Caruthers said he was pleased with how well the county responded to the outage.

“I was so proud of the way the city and county and utilities pulled together,” Caruthers said.

Middleton and Watts also noted the hard work, and long hours, put in by the city and county work crews and law enforcement for helping the city to get back on its feet after the storm.

“They just did a tremendous job,” Watts said.

Across the River

Vidalia’s Mayor Hyram Copeland said he was very pleased with the response to Gustav in Vidalia.

“We’ve been through this several times and we know the procedure,” he said. “But you never know what might happen and you just have to be organized.”

Copeland said that organization is what restored 80 percent of Vidalia’s power within 24 hours of the initial outage.

But in general Copeland said he was happy with the way the situation was handled throughout the Miss-Lou.

“The entire area did a tremendous job under the circumstances,” he said.

Ferriday’s Mayor, Glenn McGlothin, said he too was pleased with the response to the storm in his area but did see a need for a remedy to the minor flooding across Ferriday.

“We are going to do an extensive program getting the culverts cleaned around town,” he said.

McGlothin also said he planned to file for grants for generators to power the sewage lift station which lost power during the storm.