More than a week after Hurricane Isaac soaked Warren County, the storm is all but an afterthought for most people.

For Warren County Emergency Management Agency Director John Elfer, the storm — or rather how the community and officials responded to the storm — remains at the forefront.

“This was my first big incident since I became director, and we have realized how important it is to get information and pass information along,” said Elfer, who was appointed to the position in June 2011. “We were very successful with that.”

Sharing information was fundamental during the storm. Representatives from city, county and federal agencies met multiple times daily for nearly a week to exchange ideas and let the public know the potential dangers of the storm — roads would be blocked and power would be off. The public listened and began preparing as the storm approached, rather than making a last-minute, mad dash for supplies, Elfer said.

“Folks early on, using lessons learned from prior storms, stocked up on items they might need,” he said.

The lesson in that, he said, is that sharing information early and often helps keep the community safe and ready and keeps people off the roads during the peek of the storm.

“The cooperation between … all of our partner agencies had a lot to do with the success of the response,” Elfer said.

Isaac packed plenty of potential for danger, but put into historical context, the storm had a relatively insignificant impact on the county. The Category 1 storm weakened as it passed over Warren County and sent one family to a Red Cross shelter, damaged homes, toppled trees and knocked out power for more than 6,000 customers. Some of the outages lasted several days, but none lasted on average longer than when Hurricane Katrina swept across Mississippi and Louisiana in 2005. During Katrina, many in Warren County were without electricity for more than a week.

During Isaac, fuel was readily available, the town wasn’t teeming with thousands of evacuees and city and county infrastructures weren’t severely damaged. Isaac’s significance didn’t come from its overall damage but from the opportunities it provided for emergency workers, Elfer said.

“We had a really good opportunity to exercise emergency management,” Elfer said.

MEMA was assessing damage from the storm this week and the City of Vicksburg and Warren County could be reimbursed 75 percent of expenses incurred during the storm.

Warren County is one of the 48 counties and the Mississippi Choctaw Indian Reservation eligible to have costs covered for debris removal and a range of protective measures, including overtime pay.

On the surface it doesn’t appear there is much to learn from Isaac, but Elfer said the county has much to learn.

“I think that there’s always lessons to be learned, no matter what event you are responding to or participating in,” he said.

Each responding agency is performing an after-action review that will map shortcomings in the response, though overall the operations went well, he said.

One of the major challenges of Isaac was providing up-to-date information, Elfer said. National Weather Service officials have said Isaac was incredibly difficult to track. With all the lateral movement of the storm, forecasts from 8 a.m. often were no longer valid at noon. Elfer’s office combatted the ever-changing information with technology.

Since Elfer took office, the emergency operations center has added computers, a conference phone and other tech gadgets financed with grant money from MEMA.

“We’re constantly having to change and adapt to changing information,” Elfer said.