The Lee County Board of Commissioners voted to adopt a new emergency plan Tuesday morning.
The county has taken lessons learned from Hurricane Ian and incorporated those into the new plan, public safety director Ben Abes told NBC2.
The Ian after-action report and recovery task force both helped offer input for the new plan, known as the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, or CEMP.
“There were a lot of things, a lot of lessons that we could take from that,” Abes said.
The emergency plan is the first new version since 2018 and has been rewritten to follow a new federal framework.
“I'm very confident that if we have an event, we're going to be able to use this plan to help address the needs of the community,” Abes said.
After Ian , in the wake of the storm that killed dozens of people in Lee alone, the county was scrutinized that evacuation orders came too late and didn’t follow that part of their emergency plan.
Abes said that the storm prompted changes to their policies.
“We learned a lot about how to communicate risk to the community,” he said. “And we've demonstrated how we've changed our method of communication with both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. We've made a lot of adjustments in that area.”
Abes said the new plan allows the county to be more flexible as new information and new data comes in. Ordering evacuations in a coastal county is not something they take lightly.
“We don't want to cement ourselves into a specific policy or timing schedule,” Abes said. “We want to use the most up-to-date methodologies, then use that to inform the decisions that we make."
Once the newest version of the plan is available online, it will be posted here .