OKTIBBEHA COUNTY — Oktibbeha county’s emergency response agency is struggling to keep its staffing and volunteer numbers up, while it has also been facing a series of severe weather events this year.
Oktibbeha County Emergency Management Agency Director Kristen Campanella gave Starkville’s board of aldermen an update Friday during its work session on the status of those services. The city partners with the county for its 911 and emergency management services, even within city limits.
“We always say it can never happen here, and thankfully we’ve been lucky enough in the past few years that we haven’t had a major disaster,” Campanella said. “But it’s going to happen. It’s all about when it is and what it is.”
Oktibbeha 911 has answered 26,000 calls for help just this year, according to Campanella’s stats, coordinating emergency medical service to more than 30 incidents. It made roughly 375,000 communications for 911 calls, radio transmissions, incident reports and administrative coordination total since 2025 began.
Emergency services have also added the ability to communicate with citizens via text, receive cellular video and pinpoint locations with 10-foot precision using the What3words geocode mapping system.
But while the agency now has more communications capacity, it also faces a changing threat. Campanella told the board she couldn’t say definitively that weather conditions are becoming more frequent or extreme, but she did present several statistics noting the recent prevalence of severe weather.
Oktibbeha County has already had 30 severe weather incidents this year, with eight in March and five just 11 days into April.
Mississippi has reported 92 tornadoes this year, nearby double that of second place Missouri at 57, Campanella said. This time last year, the state had seen only 23, according to statistics from the National Weather Service.
The county is now quadrupling its tornado sirens from two to eight, with the extra six slated for installation at volunteer fire stations.
Their range is hard to estimate because it varies drastically with weather conditions, and Campanella said they’re intended as outdoor warning systems to tell people to seek shelter rather than something to wake people up or alert them indoors. She still recommends citizens keep multiple warning systems.
Campanella has also started opening the Community Safe Room at 984 Lynn Lane earlier in the day when severe weather is expected rather than waiting for it to arrive. A storm in early March saw more than 200 people seek shelter there, though it didn’t wind up hitting Oktibbeha as hard as expected, she said.
While it hasn’t been hard for Campanella to find daytime volunteers for the safe room, overnight staffing has proven more difficult. The county’s emergency response has been having broader staffing issues as well, with its four employees covering multiple roles and the service struggling to find new ones.
Campanella said it’s an issue many similar organizations are confronting nationwide.
“We’re definitely short-staffed,” she said. “I have the availability, I just don’t have people coming in (to fill it). … It’s everywhere right now. We don’t work the best hours. We work nights, we work weekends. The job isn’t right for everybody.”
Volunteers are vetted and given training, and Campanella encouraged anyone interested to contact emergency management at (662) 338-1076 or [email protected].
Mayor Lynn Spruill said the city could maybe help with the shortage of volunteers, whether through city personnel filling positions directly or by coordinating with willing residents. She also praised emergency management for their close work with city employees and residents, for which the city budgets $5,600 annually in civil defense funding.
“Clearly they’re a partner in keeping our community safe, from police to fire to weather activity, it’s incredibly important,” she said. “I find myself in contact with many many residents about whether the safe room is open or even who they can call for a water leak after hours. A lot of that gets routed through 911. It’s a daily partnership.”
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