Kemp puts all 159 Georgia counties under emergency before Isaias comes ashore

Governor Brian Kemp signed an updated state of emergency on Thursday for all 159 counties in Georgia, ahead of Hurricane Isaias. The order lets emergency managers stage equipment and people before the storm reaches the state. He told the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency to open the State Operations Center early on Friday afternoon. Director Josh Lamb said the agency was working with local, state and federal partners and that every part of Georgia could see effects.

"As we always do with weather events, we're hoping for the best but preparing for the worst," Kemp said. He told residents to buy food, batteries, flashlights and water, and to be ready for severe weather from Friday night through Saturday. Forecasters expected landfall on the Gulf Coast on Friday evening, with rain and gusts continuing over Georgia into Saturday. The risks named in the state note are spin-off tornadoes, fallen trees, downed lines and flooding.

What the Thursday advisory actually said

The National Hurricane Center's 1 pm CDT advisory on Thursday placed Isaias near 24.0 north, 89.8 west, with maximum sustained winds of 85 miles an hour and a central pressure of 975 millibars. Eighty-five miles an hour is category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Category 2 begins at 96. A later public description, including the Wikipedia current-events entry and local Georgia forecasts, said the storm had strengthened to category 2, and local forecasts had it reaching the central Gulf coast on Friday evening at that strength. The gap between the 1 pm wind and the evening expectation is the number a county manager has to plan against. A category 1 landfall and a category 2 landfall are different loads on a roof and on a distribution line. Kemp's order does not wait for the evening advisory to choose.

The hurricane warning already in force on Thursday afternoon ran from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to the Bay and Gulf county line in Florida. Storm surge warnings covered the mouth of the Mississippi to Steinhatchee. Georgia is not in that warning. Georgia is in the inland path. That is why the state order talks about Friday night through Saturday, not about a landfall on the Georgia coast. The water that matters for Atlanta, Macon and the fall line is rain after landfall, not the surge at the beach.

What an all-county order changes

An emergency order covering every county is a legal switch. It lets the state move National Guard troops, suspend some procurement rules, and ask for federal help without writing a new order for each county that floods. It does not evacuate anyone. Kemp did not issue a coastal evacuation because Georgia's coast is not the forecast landfall. The action he did take is the opening of the operations centre on Friday afternoon, before the rain. Lamb's point, that resources are positioned for any part of the state, is the inland version of a surge warning. The damage, if it comes, will be trees on lines and water on roads, spread across counties that do not appear on the hurricane-warning map.

Middle Georgia forecasts carried on Thursday night put rainfall on the western side of the region near three inches over the following days, and one to two inches farther east. Those are local figures, not a Hurricane Center product. They are enough to explain why an emergency for all 159 counties is not a symbolic map. A county that gets three inches on ground already wet from September will close roads. A county that gets one inch may not. The order treats both as inside the same legal event.

The check on Friday evening

The useful comparison, once the storm comes ashore, is the 85-mile-an-hour advisory against the wind at landfall, and the Georgia rainfall against the one-to-three-inch local range. If landfall stays at category 1, the state's early opening of the operations centre will look like ordinary caution. If the storm is category 2 and the inland rain exceeds that range, the all-county order is the document counties will use to ask for the costs. Either result can be read off the Hurricane Center's next advisory and off the rain gauges. The order itself is already signed.