Charleston city workers handling Hanna

Behind the covered windows of Charleston City Hall on Friday, department heads and support staff were tracking Hanna throughout the day from a temporary command post in City Council chambers.

With sleeping bags piled in one corner and pizzas stacked on a table in the break room, they were prepared to stay through the night.

"The planning for the recovery will start here," said Emergency Operations Manager Tom O'Brien.

Mayor Joe Riley was in and out of City Hall throughout the day, where he would get a briefing from each department head and often give his familiar pep talk about how hurricanes are an opportunity, however unfortunate, for the city to provide excellent service to citizens when they need it the most.

"I feel so good about our level of readiness and preparedness," he told the assembled staff at one afternoon meeting.

A pair of peepholes cut in the boards over the windows of the mayors' office allowed one of the only vantage points from City Hall to see what was going on outside.

Storm tracking charts, radar loops, and satellite images on a dozen computers set up in Council Chambers tracked what was coming.

The rest of the City Hall windows were fully covered, and likely to remain so well into next week as the city watches the path of Hurricane Ike.

With the worst of Hanna expected around midnight, public works and parks crews were told to report back to work Saturday around 7 a.m., or as early as conditions allowed, to begin assessing damage and cleaning up the city.

Riley said roofs and trees throughout the city hadn't been tested by high winds since Hurricane Gaston four years ago, and he predicted many fallen limbs would await work crews in the morning.

Still, Hanna was turning out to be much less of a threat than expected, and city officials took to treating it as a useful training experience that could help prepare for more serious storms in the future.

“Tabletop exercises are good, but you can’t beat adrenaline,” Riley said. “This has been a great exercise.”

At the city's Police Department, the new Public Safety Operations Center was activated for the first time, to coordinate and respond to storm-related calls.

In the Public Safety Operations Center, more than a dozen people from several city departments worked together Friday as non-emergency calls came in 911 and were routed to the different departments. For example, a call about a clogged storm drain would be diverted from the Police Department to the city’s Public Service Department. The Parks Department would get the calls about downed trees, and so on.

Police Chief Greg Mullen said the system frees up police for emergency calls, but also coordinates calls so that if people call three different city departments about a fallen tree, those calls all end up in the same place, where the problem is tracked until it is resolved.

“It really lets us drill down and focus on the things we need to do,” Mullen said. “It helps people prioritize.”

Police officers were assigned to 12-hour shifts, and vehicles were positioned outside of areas prone to flooding. The Fire Department brought on extra staff at stations on Johns, James, and Daniel islands.