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<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHurricane Helene Polk County storm statistics:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- The Emergency Operations Center was partially activated for five days to coordinate response efforts.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Polk County distributed 39,171 sandbags to residents on Tuesday and Wednesday.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- There was one tornado warning on Thursday evening.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- The top wind speed recorded in Polk County on Thursday was 59 mph, in Fort Meade.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- As of 6 a.m. this morning, there were 5,655 power outages in Polk County.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Two homes received major damage due to falling trees.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Additionally, early this morning, a convoy of about 45 people left Polk County and headed to Taylor County to provide storm recovery assistance. Polk County\u2019s mutual aid team (in times of disaster, Florida\u2019s counties routinely rely on help from other, less-impacted counties) is comprised of employees from Polk County Fire Rescue, Polk County\u2019s Emergency Management Division and the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. The team will be gone for a minimum of 10 days and it is expected that they will work 12-hour shifts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn the emergency management world, we always look out for our neighbors,\u201d Womble said. \u201cSometimes, it\u2019s workers from other counties leaving their families behind to come help us, and there are times when we go help our neighbors.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s safe to say that Polk County got lucky with Hurricane Helene, avoiding much of the storm\u2019s wrath. \u201cWe were blessed,\u201d said Paul Womble, Polk County\u2019s Emergency Management director. \u201cWe… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"12","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2,"attached_media":[{"id":50220,"url":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/9-27-24-NG-Hurricane-Helene-Deployment-10-jpg.webp","type":"image\/jpeg"}]},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[9864,9865],"class_list":["post-50218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","category-news","tag-hurricane-helene","tag-polk-county-wrap-up"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50221,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50218\/revisions\/50221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}