Hernando County camp teaches girls leadership, emergency preparedness skills

Girls entering grades 6 through 12 spent five days at Hernando County’s Emergency Operations Center learning CPR, public safety basics and how to build disaster supply kits as the county held its fifth HERricane HERnando Emergency Preparedness Camp. The free program ran June 22 to June 26, 2026, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at 18900 Cortez Blvd. in Brooksville.

Hernando County Emergency Management says the camp is designed to do more than teach storm prep. County materials say it is meant to help girls lead boldly, serve confidently and explore careers in emergency management and public safety, while giving them skills they can use when severe weather threatens homes, schools and neighborhoods across Hernando County.

The county’s emergency management mission reaches beyond hurricanes. Officials say the agency is focused on building resilience and the capability to mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from all hazards, a framework that includes hurricanes, wildfires and public health emergencies. County notices have also tied the camp to a broader effort to grow future emergency managers, healthcare workers, meteorologists and other public servants.

Emergency Management Director Erin Thomas said the 2026 session was the county’s fifth HERricane camp, underscoring how the program has become a recurring part of the county’s summer preparedness calendar. That repetition matters in a storm-prone county where emergency planning often falls unevenly across households, especially in families that have never assembled a disaster kit or practiced a shelter plan.

County social media posts from the first HERricane camp showed how hands-on the curriculum has been from the start. Participants built disaster supply kits, competed in a cooking challenge using nonperishable foods and learned about shelter operations. Those exercises turn preparedness into something more concrete than a checklist, and they put practical skills in the hands of girls who can carry them back to their families before the next storm arrives.