🚀 go-pugleaf

With several recent tornado outbreaks there has been a lot of discussion
about tornado sirens.  It's generally agreed that the NWS issues warnings
but it's up to local emergency management (EM) to actually activate the
sirens (there may be a few exceptions).  We've heard that in some cases
local EM will activate their sirens based on nothing more than rotating
wall clouds --regardless of whether a tornado warning is in effect.  Last
year on WX-TALK Greg Stumpf and I had some dialogue about whether local EM
should activate their sirens based solely on NWS radar indications.  While I
said that we (my emergency management organization) prefer to verify events
before sounding the sirens I did concede that there are circumstances where
spotter information is lacking and/or viisibility is poor --making radar-based
warnings the only thing to go on.

Last Friday night we had a series of small but powerful storms (basically
isolated cells in a line but not a squall line in the true sense of the
word) that the Paducah, KY 88D was getting mesocyclone indications on.  Paducah
issued a series of tornado warnings for which some of them had verifiable
tornado damage.  What I fould interesting is that several communities
activated their sirens even though the storms were well northwest of their
communities and moving to the northeast.  I've noticed a tendency, at least
around here in southern Illinois, for people to throw out verification and
procedures and default back to panic mode as soon as any nearby city reports
having a tornado.

Friday night I was out chasing in the county (since nothing was happening in
Carbondale) when my deputy coordinator advised me that he was about to sound
Carbondale's sirens based on a radar-indicated developing tornado in a cell
15 miles northwest of Carbondale and moving northeast at 45 MPH.  At our EOC
we had The Weather Channel on and the local radar was showing no storms in
our immediate vicinity.  Despite having information indicating that Carbondale
was in no immediate danger, our officials felt it was necessary to activate
the sirens.  I was able to talk them out of doing this by walking them
through the verification steps over the cell phone.  I'm curious whether this
"throw out the procedures" mentality is a local phenonema or whether people
have seen it elsewhere.  While there's some truth to saying it's better to
err on the side of safety and that it's better to be safe than sorry, I
can't help but wonder how the general public is affected by false alarms.

Comments anyone?  ..Chris..
*====================================================================*
Chris Hayes Novy - WA9V   Internet: chris@siu.edu
Southern Illinois Univ.             chris@lib.siu.edu
Systems Administration       Phone: (618) 453-1683 (work)
Morris Library                      (618) 457-6149 (home)
Carbondale, IL 62901-6632      FAX: (618) 453-3440
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