Tornado Outbreak

I was planning on writing this post following the Brown's draft selection. Then they traded way back so they'll probably be picking around midnight now. That means this post was moved the ever present, "in the meantime." I may accidentally type exclamations in reaction to the picks.

Holy Hell, the Vikings took Christian Ponder?

See like that.

I prefer this to anything to do with the Royal Wedding*. I care a whole hell of a lot more about players becoming NFL players than some commoner becoming princess.

I took a midterm today. It sucked. I probably didn't do very well on it. I ended up guessing on a lot of the Multiple Choice questions. I think I did alright on the Essay portion. I really should have studied a lot more for it, but I just didn't.

This is about to take a heavy turn.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There may be a new rival for the 1974 Super Outbreak. I don't think we'll every see an outbreak that will compare to 1974's in terms of EF5 tornadoes. There were 6 over a two day period and that would be about normal for a decade. However in the past few days there have been about 150ish tornadoes. There is a lot of confirming and investigating to be done to have a sure number. That is very close to the number of twisters in the 1974 outbreak. The death tolls are beginning to approach each other. That is probably the most disconcerting part of this.

It's 2011. We have Doppler radar. Media is more abundant. And most importantly warning times are much, much better than they were in 1974. Tornado Outbreaks will happen. However, the death tolls should never be as high as they once were. And they haven't been recent times, until recently. Something is going wrong in the system of Warning and it is putting people in danger that we shouldn't be in 40 years down the line.

I know I am personally desensitized to Tornado Warnings. I discussed this issue more in detail here. I know it's better to give some Tornado Warnings when there aren't Tornadoes than to not give Warnings when there aren't Tornadoes. It's hard to begrudge the NWS for some false warnings.

One action that I think should be taken is that the use of Tornado Sirens should be more localized. The National Weather Service changed their warning system within the past year so that warnings are no longer based on counties, but rather on Storm path. The local warning systems should reflect this change. There also shouldn't be areas that don't have sirens. I can't imagine Tornado Sirens are that expensive. If an area doesn't have one, it shouldn't be a terrible cost to the state to put one up.

I'd say in the past few years, I've been a Tornado warned county around 5 times a year. Whether the storm that gets the warning is near where I am or not, I hear the sirens. They have stopped producing any urgency for me and I know it's the same for a lot of other people. It's almost a "meh" reaction when I hear them off. The sirens can be going off, but if it doesn't look bad out my window, I don't change what I'm doing.

I don't see why it would be so tough to have control over individual siren control. Let the areas that will be affected by the storm hear the warning sirens and avoid diminishing their power.

Steps need to be taken. The high number of fatalities we've seen this April from Tornadoes is not acceptable in 2011. We have the Technology to keep Tornado deaths to a minimum and we need to ensure that is that is the case

Thanks for reading and please comment.

-Michael

*What will I bitch about when it's over?