Panama City - When Bay County Emergency Management officials moved into their new operations center last April, they put it to use immediately.

For the next six months, workers had to oversee the county's response to the gulf oil spill.

On April 20th, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Two days later local officials cut the ribbon on the new Bay County Emergency Operations Center.

Emergency management officials immediately turned their attentions to the potential impacts of the oil spill, delaying plans for a more aggressive series of hurricane response training exercises.

Tuesday, the county was able to get those plans back on track.

"This training is critical for governmental entities and for private sectors that partner with us for response and recovery during or after storms or any other type of disaster," points out Chief Mark Bowen.

Texas A&M officials, conducting the first training exercise, were impressed by the local facility, comparing it to the EOC in Houston.

This week's three day session is geared to first responders.

"They will actually get the opportunity to respond to a simulated event occurring right here, as opposed to some fictitious location in who knows where USA," said Grassinger.

Bowen is hoping this week's session will be the first of many.

"When it comes down to it, Incident Command and the National Incident Management System and things like that, we're going to use that here more often than not for hurricanes, so we are going to focus on that as often as we can," said Grassinger.

Bay County is paying for this $30,000 training session with a Homeland Security grant.