Issued By

Atlanta - GA, US, National Weather Service

Affected Area

Toombs County

Description

This product covers North and Central Georgia **HURRICANE ISAIAS STRENGTHENING OVER THE GULF* NEW INFORMATION ---------------

CHANGES TO WATCHES AND WARNINGS: - None

CURRENT WATCHES AND WARNINGS: - A Tropical Storm Watch is in effect for Chattahoochee, Harris, Heard, Macon, Marion, Meriwether, Muscogee, Pike, Schley, Stewart, Sumter, Talbot, Taylor, Troup, Upson, and Webster

STORM INFORMATION: - About 750 miles south-southwest of Atlanta GA or about 650 miles south-southwest of Columbus GA - 24.0N 89.8W - Storm Intensity 85 mph - Movement East-northeast or 60 degrees at 10 mph

SITUATION OVERVIEW ------------------ As of 2 PM ET, Hurricane Isaias was located in the southern Gulf with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, moving ENE at 10 mph. Isaias is forecast to turn northward on Friday and accelerate towards the northern Gulf Coast late Friday into early Saturday. As Isaias moves inland on Saturday, widespread impacts are expected across North and Central Georgia, including a prolonged period of strong, gusty winds, heavy rainfall with localized flooding, and the potential for several tornadoes. The wind field associated with Isaias is expected to expand considerably as the system moves inland over the Gulf Coast and up across Mississippi and Alabama. Strong winds will extend well east of the center, potentially into West-Central Georgia. A Tropical Storm Watch is in effect for this area where wind gusts of 40 to 50 mph will be possible. Further north and east, while Isaias will be weakening and becoming post-tropical, there will be a very strong pressure gradient between the system and strong high pressure over the Mid-Atlantic. This gradient will support a prolonged period of strong easterly winds with frequent gusts to 40 to 50 mph across most of North Georgia from early Saturday through early Sunday. A High Wind Watch has been issued for this area. The prolonged and strong winds could lead to power outages from downed limbs and trees, especially when combined with saturated soils from periods of heavy rain. Isaias will bring widespread rainfall, with multiple bands of heavy rain expected Friday night through Sunday. Rainfall totals of 1 to 3 inches are likely across much of the area, with localized amounts up to 5 inches possible. This rainfall could lead to localized flash flooding, particularly in urban and poor-drainge areas, as well as flood-prone creeks and streams. A Flood Watch has been issued for the entire area. Additionally, as Isaias tracks northward and inland on Saturday, a favorable environment for tornadoes will develop across North and Central Georgia, and potentially linger into Sunday morning. Several tornadoes will be possible, particularly within the outer rainbands of the system. These types of tornadoes typically develop quickly, and could occur throughout the overnight hours Saturday night.

POTENTIAL IMPACTS -----------------

WIND: Prepare for hazardous wind having possible significant impacts across North and Central Georgia. Potential impacts in this area include: - Damage to porches, awnings, carports, sheds, and unanchored mobile homes. Unsecured lightweight objects blown about. - Many large tree limbs broken off. A few trees snapped or uprooted, but with greater numbers in places where trees are shallow rooted. Some fences and roadway signs blown over. - A few roads impassable from debris, particularly within urban or heavily wooded places. Hazardous driving conditions on bridges and other elevated roadways. - Numerous power and communications outages.

FLOODING RAIN: Prepare for dangerous rainfall flooding having possible significant impacts across North and Central Georgia. Potential impacts include: - Rainfall flooding may prompt several evacuations and rescues. - Rivers and tributaries may quickly become swollen with swifter currents and overspill their banks in a few places, especially in usually vulnerable spots. Small streams, creeks, canals, arroyos, and ditches overflow. - Flood waters can enter some structures or weaken foundations. Several places may experience expanded areas of rapid inundation at underpasses, low-lying spots, and poor drainage areas. Some streets and parking lots take on moving water as storm drains and retention ponds overflow. Driving conditions become hazardous. Some road and bridge closures.

TORNADOES: Prepare for a dangerous tornado event having possible significant impacts across North and Central Georgia. Potential impacts include: - The occurrence of scattered tornadoes can hinder the execution of emergency plans during tropical events. - Several places may experience tornado damage with a few spots of considerable damage, power loss, and communications failures. - Locations could realize roofs torn off frame houses, mobile homes demolished, boxcars overturned, large trees snapped or uprooted, vehicles tumbled, and small boats tossed about. Dangerous projectiles can add to the toll.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS ----------------------------------

EVACUATIONS: Follow the advice of local officials.

OTHER PREPAREDNESS INFORMATION: Now is the time to check your emergency plan and emergency supplies kit and take necessary actions to protect your family and secure your home or business. When making safety and preparedness decisions, do not focus on the exact forecast track since hazards such as flooding rain, damaging wind gusts, and tornadoes extend well away from the center of the storm. If in a place that is vulnerable to high wind, such as near large trees, a manufactured home, upper floors of a high-rise building, or on a boat, plan to move to safe shelter. Always heed the advice of local officials and comply with orders that are issued. Do not needlessly jeopardize your life or the lives of others. When securing your property, outside preparations should be concluded as soon as possible before conditions deteriorate. The onset of strong gusty winds or flooding can cause certain preparedness activities to become unsafe. Be sure to let friends and family members know of your intentions for weathering the storm and your whereabouts. Have someone located away from the threatened area serve as your point of contact. Share vital contact information with others. Keep cell phones handy and charged. Check on those who may not be fully aware of the situation or who are unable to make personal preparations. If you are a visitor, know the name of the county or parish in which you are located and where it is relative to current watches and warnings. If staying at a hotel, ask the management staff about their onsite disaster plan. Listen for evacuation orders, especially pertaining to area visitors. Closely monitor weather.gov, NOAA Weather Radio and local news outlets for official storm information. Listen for possible changes to the forecast. There is a threat from tornadoes with this storm. Have multiple ways to receive Tornado Warnings. Be ready to shelter quickly.

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Written by Jeff Raiford

Category: Newsbreak

Published: 08 October 2026

Hits: 197

Opportunities abound at VHS, and CTAE is a critical part of preparing our students for what comes next. Whether their path leads to Employment, Enlistment, or Enrollment, the Three E’s, we are equipping students with the skills, knowledge, and experiences they need to succeed beyond graduation. 

This month, Vidalia High School spotlights the Early Childhood Education (ECE) pathway! Students interested in working with children and pursuing careers in education can gain valuable knowledge and hands-on experience as they explore the many opportunities available in the early childhood field. 

Our ECE students take learning beyond the classroom through Reality Care Babies and our daycare simulator, providing students with hands-on opportunities to experience the responsibilities and daily operations involved in caring for and working with young children. These experiences help students develop responsibility, communication, time-management, problem-solving, and professional skills while gaining a better understanding of what it takes to work in the early childhood field. 

Students also have the opportunity to complete Field Experience hours at Vidalia Learning Center, giving them the chance to apply what they learn in the classroom in a real-world early childhood setting. Through these experiences, students interact with young children and educators while developing classroom management, leadership, communication, and instructional skills. 

Great pathways start with great instructors! We are proud to provide our ECE students with meaningful opportunities to learn, grow, and gain real-world experience as they prepare for careers in education and early childhood development. Students can also explore leadership and career opportunities through FCCLA, our CTSO that connects classroom learning with leadership, service, competition, and community involvement. 

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Written by Kathy Hilt

Category: Newsbreak

Published: 07 October 2026

Hits: 172

Emanuel County is launching a new public alert system, and officials are asking every resident to sign up, including anyone who was already signed up with the county’s previous provider.

The county’s former system, CodeRED, failed during Hurricane Helene and remained unreliable in the months that followed. Since then, Emanuel County joined a nationwide exodus as cities and counties across the country severed ties with CodeRED at the same time. Local staff spent months testing replacement systems before settling on a two-part approach that, at its core, is meant to prevent a single point of failure from leaving the county in the dark again.

Emanuel County's Emergency Management Agency (EMA) Director, Courtney Terwilliger, initiated the change and led the early exploration and transition away from CodeRED.

“He really got this up off the ground,” Foster Grimes, Emanuel County Fire Coordinator and Deputy EMA Director, said. “I give a lot of credit to him for recognizing, along with everybody else, that CodeRED wasn’t working and seeing to it that we do something about it.”

That “something” became a two-part system built around redundancy.

“We built this new system so that we never find ourselves in the situation we did with the CodeRED problems,” Grimes said. “In theory, we should be able to reach our folks in one way or another.”

The new system works in two parts.

Together, they make up what the county is calling Emanuel County Mass Notifications.

The first part connects the county to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) national alert network. County staff administer this part through a platform called AlertSense.

It sends messages for serious, life-safety emergencies such as an active shooter, bomb threats, a hazardous materials incident, or other immediate threats requiring urgent public action. In those cases, the county can push an alert directly to any capable cell phone within the county’s borders, the same way an Amber Alert reaches the public. No sign-up is required for this part of the system; any resident within the physical bounds of Emanuel County will have the alert reach their phone automatically.

The second part of Emanuel County Mass Notifications is administered through CivicPlus, the county’s website provider. Residents interact with this part of the system through the Resident Portal on the county website, where they can sign up and manage the types of alerts they want to receive.

The county has already built templates for black ice and winter storms, dense fog, extreme cold and extreme heat, flash flooding, high wind, tropical storm and hurricane warnings, nuclear warnings, fire hazard weather and wildfire warnings, severe thunderstorms and tornado warnings, and toxic smoke. This list reflects a clear focus on warnings; the county has opted to forgo watches altogether.

“There’s already enough confusion around weather in everyday life,” Grimes said. “If you stopped 10 people on the street and asked them the difference between a watch and a warning, I’m not sure how many could tell you. Basically, a watch means something could happen. A warning means it’s happening or it’s about to. For our purposes, we’d rather focus on what’s real and what people need to act on.”

But the Resident Portal goes well beyond weather. It also handles routine, non-emergent notices residents might appreciate in their day to day.

Residents can opt in to Weather Alerts, Emergency Alerts, regular Notifications or any combination of the three.

In addition to weather alerts, CivicPlus can deliver the same emergency messages as the first part of the system as a backup for redundancy, along with notices the federal system is not designed to carry, including boil water advisories, road closures and traffic hazards, election reminders, meeting notices, deadline reminders and more.

“This new 2-prong approach, especially the CivicPlus part, is so much more robust and gives us a lot of flexibility and customization,” County Clerk Halei Lamb said. “Like, we can now send jury duty cancellation notices for our clerk of court, share updates from our recreation department. Eventually, we may even use it to send internal alerts to our employees. CodeRED couldn’t do any of that.”

Lamb continued, reiterating the importance of opting in.

“Like Foster said, this is the part of Mass Notifications people have to act on. It’s a great system, but it won’t work very well for you if you don’t sign up. Foster has been pestering CodeRED for months about our contact list. We’re not sure if this is intentional or if it’s a data issue on their end related to the outage pre-Helene, but for whatever reason, we haven’t gotten it, so we need everyone to sign up again. To be clear, let me say it again: it doesn’t matter if you signed up for CodeRED in the past. Everybody has to sign up again if you want weather alerts.”

Registering takes about two minutes on the county’s website. In doing so, residents choose how they want to be reached: text, email, phone call, or any combination. They’re also now in charge of what categories of alerts they want to receive: Emergency Alerts, regular Notifications, Weather alerts, all three, or a specific mix-and-match.

Lamb says the process should be user-friendly for “tech-savvy” residents. The mobile- and desktop-compatible portal is public-facing today for those who want to complete it on their own. It’s linked to the Notifications button on the homepage of the county website.

“Here’s another really great, cool thing about the direction we went: CivicPlus allows us to push alerts directly to Facebook. Again, CodeRED didn’t do that,” Lamb added.

There is no hard go-live date. Instead, the county has opted to trickle out implementation of Mass Notifications, putting it to use when needed. The quieter rollout is meant to give the county an opportunity to put the system to work without turning its launch into a production, while also leaving room to learn, adjust, and improve it as they go.

Unknowingly, some residents have already started seeing some of them on Facebook in recent weeks.

“We put out a thunderstorm warning and apparently it didn’t rain a drop for somebody,” Grimes said with a laugh. “Unfortunately, that’s going to happen sometimes. The weather component is based on the National Weather Service. We do not control that now, nor will we ever. Nor do we want to, if I’m being honest. We’d rather leave that to the professionals. But to give you the gist, a warning covers the whole area where conditions could turn dangerous, not just the spot where you’re standing, and to that point, we’d always rather give people a warning than not. What you do or don’t do with that information is entirely up to you.”

Behind the scenes, the county has also built a library of graphics for alerts alerts posted on Facebook and the website and linked in alerts delivered via text. 

By design, neither AlertSense nor CivicPlus are hard-coded for graphics. This was an extra step the county took.

“As badly as this sounds, people are lazy content consumers these days. We’ve gotten spoiled with videos on our feeds. You better at least give them a picture if you want them to stop, so that’s what we did,” Lamb said. “And we were intentional during the design process so the graphics work at a glance. They don’t require any brain power. Of course, there’s a line or two of text on them with a relevant icon in the background, but we also color-coded everything. For example, graphics in the county’s signature green, Pine Thicket, are reserved for everyday information.”

Meanwhile, red marks life-threatening emergencies.

“We don’t have red in our county brand palette, but we wanted something that would stop folks in their tracks,” Lamb said. “We wanted something bright and urgent.”

Brown-toned graphics signal an update to a previous alert with a yellow bar across the top marking what kind of update it is.

“I hope over time, people come to learn and understand the difference. I hope we can save some lives this way,” Lamb said. “If there’s a tornado on the ground, we hope you don’t even have to read the warning. We hope you see the icon, see red, and head for cover.”

However, weather alerts have a special exception: the county generally will not issue updates for those.

“Our thought process there was, we believe in most cases, residents can usually tell when an immediate threat like a tornado or severe thunderstorm has passed. Alert fatigue is a real thing, and we don’t want to wear our folks out,” Grimes said. “If we see there’s a special circumstance where it might be good to break this rule and issue another alert, we can certainly do that, but as a general rule of thumb, we’re planning to let you know on the front end and leave it at that.”

The font on the graphics is intentional as well.

When the county redesigned its website in 2023, staff chose a clean, simple sans-serif font called Figtree (the typeface of this paragraph). Unlike a traditional serif font such as Times New Roman, Figtree’s letters have no small decorative strokes at the ends, and its open, evenly spaced characters are generally easier to read at a glance, especially on a screen.

The choice put the county ahead of a requirement that didn’t exist yet: in April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local government websites to meet specific digital accessibility standards, known as Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.1. Emanuel County’s compliance deadline under that rule isn’t until 2028, but the groundwork, including font choice, is already in place. 

“When we decided to add graphics to the Mass Notifications system, we knew right away which font we wanted to use. It had to be Figtree. It’s a pretty nerdy or niche thing to consider, but we knew it would be important for someone who’s scrolling on Facebook. There’s enough noise on social media, so you need to use every advantage you can to get them to stop.”

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Written by Kathy Hilt

Category: Newsbreak

Published: 08 October 2026

Hits: 128

Vidalia High School is celebrating another year of strong student achievement as the Class of 2026 posted a 95.7% graduation rate, continuing a decade-long tradition of high graduation rates at VHS.

While the success of the Class of 2026 is worthy of celebration on its own, school leaders say the larger story is the consistency behind the number. Vidalia High School has maintained a graduation rate of 92% or higher for 10 consecutive years, with a 10-year average graduation rate of 94.43%. Over the most recent seven-year period, VHS has maintained a similarly strong 94.39% average.

That sustained success reflects Vidalia High School’s commitment to ensuring students not only earn a diploma, but leave high school prepared for what comes next.

Throughout their high school experience, VHS students have access to rigorous academic coursework, Advanced Placement opportunities, Career, Technical and Agricultural Education pathways, dual enrollment, targeted intervention and academic support, and a variety of opportunities designed to prepare them for college, career, military service and life beyond high school.

The school’s graduation rate also represents the collective work of an entire school community. Behind the numbers are students who persevered, teachers and staff members who maintained high expectations while providing support, families who remained engaged in their students’ education, and community partners who continue to invest in opportunities for VHS students.

For Vidalia High School, that combination of high expectations and intentional support remains central to its mission.

The Class of 2026 now adds its own accomplishment to a decade of consistent graduation success at VHS, continuing a tradition that demonstrates what can happen when a school community remains focused on student learning, opportunity and preparation for the future.

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Written by Kathy Hilt

Category: Newsbreak

Published: 07 October 2026

Hits: 170