South Carolina is better prepared for a hurricane than it was five years ago, emergency officials say, but that doesn’t keep new problems from cropping up.

This year’s headache, for instance, is National Guard deployments overseas that took much of the equipment used during emergencies with them.

Otherwise, Gov. Mark Sanford got mostly good news Tuesday during a meeting with law enforcement officials, emergency workers and social service agencies about the state’s ability to respond to a storm like Hurricane Alex. That storm stalled off the coast this past weekend before heading up to North Carolina and out to sea.

“It is as well-tested as one can test it without going through a storm,” Sanford said of the state’s plan.

Army National Guard Col. Dale Ellenburg said his units have enough troops to help out if a hurricane strikes South Carolina’s coast. About 2,800 of the state’s 6,700 National Guard troops have been deployed around the world in response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What is lacking, Ellenburg said, is equipment. That includes generators, used to run water treatment and sewage plants when the power goes out, and bulldozers and dump trucks to help get rid of debris.

But the state has agreements with private companies to provide similar equipment, officials say, and other states often offer help in an emergency.

Troopers and transportation officials said Tuesday that practice runs at reversing lanes on major coastal highways have gone well.

Those plans came in response to massive traffic jams five years ago, when people along the coast fleeing Hurricane Floyd turned the two-hour drive on Interstate 26 between Charleston and Columbia into a nightmare of 15 hours or more.

Since then, transportation officials have created plans to reverse the lanes of major coastal highways in Hilton Head Island, Beaufort, Charleston and Myrtle Beach so residents can have three or four lanes heading out during a mandatory evacuation.

Public Safety Department director James Schweitzer said he would like 20 hours’ notice of a mandatory evacuation to get the 1,500 state troopers, transportation workers and others in place to do lane reversals.

That means the governor would have to put plans in motion about 36 hours before landfall, giving a storm lots of time to change direction. Sanford said that kind of time may not be possible.

State Law Enforcement Division chief Robert Stewart said he is concerned about post-storm issues. Hundreds of officers will be needed to help protect heavily damaged areas from looters and from property owners who want to get back to their homes.

After Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston and much of the rest of the coast in 1989, Stewart said people tried anything to get back to their homes, even though power lines were down, gas lines were severed and some homes were unstable.

“More people were injured with Hugo after the storm than during the storm,” Stewart said.