Seminole County, Lake Mary host family-friendly hurricane prep event

Seminole County families and small businesses got a practical head start on hurricane season at Storm Prep Live!, a family-friendly outreach event hosted by the City of Lake Mary and Seminole County Emergency Management at Central Park at City Hall, 100 N. Country Club Road, Lake Mary, FL 32746. The timing mattered: the Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1 and runs through November 30, and the county used the event to push preparedness before a storm forces last-minute decisions about supplies, power outages, evacuation routes and cleanup costs.

The event was designed to make readiness feel immediate and local rather than abstract. Seminole County Emergency Manager Alan Harris has said the county wants residents thinking about preparedness now, and the county’s emergency-management office already runs workshops and seminars on disaster preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation techniques. Storm Prep Live! fit that broader effort by bringing public safety information and planning tools into a single, hands-on setting.

One of the most useful takeaways for residents was where to get alerts when conditions change quickly. Seminole County promotes Hyper-Reach as its mass-notification system for urgent alerts by phone, text message or email. The county also says weather alert radios remain a primary way to notify the public about severe weather, a reminder that cell service and internet access can become unreliable during a storm.

Lake Mary offered a fitting backdrop for the countywide message. The city’s 2025 estimated population is 17,516, but its daytime population is estimated at more than 35,000, reflecting the commuters, shoppers and business owners who move through the area on a daily basis. Seminole County’s official 2020 population was 470,856, giving the preparedness push broad reach across neighborhoods from Lake Mary to the rest of the county.

For families trying to decide what matters first, the message from Storm Prep Live! was straightforward: get supplies early, sign up for alerts, know how you will receive weather warnings and understand how county emergency management prepares residents before a hurricane warning ever appears. In a county of nearly half a million people, that kind of planning can spare a great deal of disruption when the season turns serious.