Drane said with extra money left in a grant recently acquired through the state, Copiah County is installing an alert system that almost acts as a brain for the rest of the facets of the system.

With alert sirens at Copiah-Lincoln Community College, Wesson and Georgetown, and one in the works at Copiah Academy in Gallman, Drane said the new "brain" communicates with the sirens in several ways.

"What this allows us to do is to be able to talk to the newer model sirens that are placed throughout the county," he said. "We can talk to those and they talk back to the equipment that is located in the (Emergency Operations Center)."

The setup allows communications with six kinds of modules, Drane said, with capability to upgrade to text messaging, various radio communications, and even to communicating with reader board signs on the road signs.

"It will talk to those big traffic signs on the highway, like if we got one here to put on say, Interstate 55, it could make that board operate too," Drane said. "This has a lot of good potential for here in the county. We're working to try to make it a safer and better community."

Drane said the system will also alert EOC if there is something wrong with one of the sirens so that malfunctions are caught before it's too late.

"Right now we have the siren module, and we can upgrade to the network messaging module where we can go in and send out alerts to people who want to get text messages during bad weather," he said.

The radio and reader board upgrades are not currently under way, but since the capability is there, it will be on the radar at some point, Drane said. Since Copiah became a National Weather Service StormReady County, there are always projects to reach for to not only to keep the StormReady rating, but also to keep members of the community safe and secure.

"This is just one part of keeping our StormReady county active, since we went StormReady last year, we're always looking to upgrade and continuously improve our protection of the county," Drane said.

The system cost about $3,000 up front, with no further payments to be made, which Drane said is a big contrast to similar software that can cost up to $15,000 up front and $15,000 a month after that.

Drane said the county is able to do projects like this one through grant money, which he researches and applies for when he finds compatible grants.

"I get lucky every once in a while and find grants and we're able to do certain projects with it," Drane said. "But I also do a lot of requesting and getting turned down."