Natural disasters know no season — rather, they simply change identity with the seasons.

On Saturday, veterans of past American Red Cross disaster shelters held a training camp of sorts at Hawkins United Methodist Church to prepare the organization’s rookie helpers and grizzled veterans for managing people and the stories they carry when storms, floods and other disasters strike.

Cymone Gates, 22, a Harvey, La. native, knows the drill of running from hurricanes all too well.

“I have the experience I can show to people from going through this,” Gates said, posing on one of a half-dozen cots set up on the church’s gymnasium floor to simulate makeshift living quarters for evacuees. “(Hurricane) Katrina sent my family to Lake Charles, San Antonio, then Killeen, Texas, then back home eight months after.

“People will be stressed and I can relate to them how I felt back then.”

Gates and Jackie Dale, 21, of Nashua, N.H., were among a handful of FEMA Corps members who role-played as evacuees for the Vicksburg-area Red Cross volunteers rebuilding their presence in the community.

“I’m interested to be here and to be learning from the other volunteers as well,” Dale said. “I’ve volunteered at shelters and it’s humbling.”

Red Cross coordinators Elizabeth Gibson, of the organization’s Meridian office, and Chase Munro, of the Hattiesburg office, worked with new local volunteer coordinator Morgan Bell and others helping first-time and veteran volunteers simulate registering people, setting up bed space and dealing with as many situations as possible.

“We handle as many people as we can after landfall of a hurricane,” Gibson said. “We try to have 20 square feet of bed space immediately after, then 40 square feet.”

Richard Van Den Akker is Vicksburg’s Red Cross shelter chief this year. One question he posed many times to the first-timers was, “How would you handle that situation?”

“We have no control over what you do outside the shelter,” he told FEMA Corps volunteers Andy Friedland and Max Stearns, both of Connecticut, who played the part of evacuees who had arrived from off the road having too much to drink. “But, these people are evacuees and they have nowhere else to go.

Hawkins is among three churches designated primary shelters for Warren County, along with First Baptist Church and Bovina Baptist Church, Munro said, adding each has adequate storage space for cots and experienced volunteers.

“We’re building up a volunteer base here,” Munro said. “And there’s teams of volunteers with local experience.”

Among them are Arthur Lagg and Susan Athow, both of whom spent weeks assisting evacuees of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, when the Vicksburg Convention Center took in about 1,100 after the scope of sheltering outgrew the physical space of local churches.

“It always helps to do these,” Lagg said, participating Saturday as a liaison for First Baptist. “It’s really important to revisit these functions every so often.”

Up to seven shelters in Warren and Issaquena counties have accommodated about 625 people during large-scale evacuations in the past decade. Whatever the next disaster brings is a chance for older first-time local volunteers to lend helping hands.

“Most important to me is being able to help survivors of the disaster through the crisis,” said Joe Tom, bouncing from one group to another with equal aplomb during Saturday’s drill. “I want to make it as comfortable as possible for them.”