Tornado

The tornado itself wasn't really worth blogging. We had to go to the basement Sunday night for a tornado warning, but it was an F0 that did a little bit of damage several miles from here. It didn't touch a thing near my house. What is worth blogging about is my dismay at our local officials' responses to the lack of siren noise in many places. Reference this news article for the whole story: I saw the same info on TV this morning.

It's been my experience that most tornado warnings are issued during thunderstorms, and most thunderstorms contain lightning and thunder, which is why they are called "thunderstorms" in the first place (clever, those weather people!). Why do we have a siren system that is vulnerable to "electrical interference because of the storm..."?? Seems like a design flaw to me.

Two sirens didn't work because of damage from a previous storm that no one bothered to fix. Never mind the fact that damage to the siren by a storm is proof positive of how much it is needed right there.

The most ridiculous quote of all comes from the director of the St. Louis City Emergency Management Agency:

Christmann cautions that the sirens are not meant to be heard indoors. They are for people who are outdoors and do not have access to a TV or a radio. He said, "If we turned it up loud enough for everybody to hear everywhere, we would probably end up blowing a lot of windows out of people's houses."

Um... so our tax money goes into a system designed only to protect people who are too stupid to come in out of a thunderstorm? Seems like a bit of a waste of money to me. People with a legitimate reason to be out in an awful storm (rescue workers, police, electric company linesmen come to mind) are probably already aware if there is nasty weather around. No one's asking for the siren to come up behind them and slap them up the side of the head, and its not realistic to expect tornado sirens to wake anyone from a sound sleep, but it would be nice to have some indication that a tornado is upon us.

I've experienced at least one tornado warning in almost every place I've ever lived (and several in Arlington, Texas which is firmly within "tornado alley" in most maps I've found). This is the first time I can think of where I heard no sirens.* I'm not saying that they have always been easy to hear indoors, but they have been audible enough for us to notice, even if we had to open the front door and step outside to make sure that was indeed what we heard. This time, it was our weather radio that told us what was up.

*We might have briefly heard a siren, but that was probably 15 minutes or so after the weather radio said to take cover -- long enough to corral two cats, lock them in the basement, fetch a small tv and drag that to the basement, go back upstairs for some chairs to sit on and drag them to the basement, go back up to find and capture the third cat and take her to the basement -- and the sound was only for a moment and might have been on television anyway.

So, if you live in either the City or County of St. Louis, the important takeaway is this: You're on your own. Get thee to a Radio Shack!