With Hurricane Alex heading away from South Carolina, Gov. Mark Sanford met with state emergency officials to go over hurricane readiness plans. "Just to walk through and make sure that there are no deficiencies out there, there's nothing we've missed," the governor said.

The Highway Patrol and Department of Transportation said recent lane reversal drills went well, and the state's plans to take care of evacuation traffic should make traffic move much faster than it did before Hurricane Floyd in 1999.

Then, traffic was bumper-to-bumper from Charleston all the way to Columbia for hours.

"The thing to be remembered, though, is look at the number of people moving down to the coast and look at the infrastructure that exists for getting people off," Gov. Sanford cautioned. "There are clear limitations no matter how many lanes you open up."

The biggest problem the group talked about that's facing the state's hurricane plans is the deployment of much of the South Carolina National Guard's equipment.

All of the Guard's Blackhawk helicopters have been deployed overseas, or will be soon. That leaves none here to handle important hurricane duties like getting people into position and carrying generators and water purification equipment where they're needed when roads are impassable.

National Guard Col. Dale Ellenburg says, "Our backup plan on that would be to go to our sister states, whether it be Texas, Mississippi, Kansas, and through EMAC, through the emergency agreement compact, we come online and say we need helicopters in South Carolina. We have talked to these states and they've all indicated, 'Hey, absolutely.'"

Ron Osborne, state emergency management director, says, "We've notified the Federal Emergency Management Agency of these shortages, and they are building up generators and other assets to help support us that they would send in immediately once we request them."

The problem with relying on these other states and FEMA is that, if a hurricane does hit, other states may also need assistance and would be asking for the same equipment. And it would take three days for helicopters to get to South Carolina from Texas or Kansas.

Despite the deployment of nearly 2,800 National Guard soldiers from South Carolina, Col. Ellenburg says we have enough to handle a hurricane. He says 1,593 are required to handle hurricane duties and there are 3,823 Guardsmen still in the state.