A lot of us can take the loud emergency sirens for granted when they go off to inform us that bad weather is near, but if you live in a small town like my parents you may not have that luxury. Even in 2012 there are still small towns in the United States that don’t inform their citizens when danger is near. A lot of these small towns have a siren that can be heard throughout town, but they feel it is better used to inform citizens when it is noon, rather than impending danger.
So what is the solution for these folks? Well, a weather radio of course! Well, maybe not… I’ve always been a fan of these little devices that go off whenever there is a watch, warning, or advisory but a lot of folks find them annoying, Especially when they go off at 3 o’clock in the morning to alert them of a Severe Thunderstorm Watch. In all reality, who is really going to do anything for a tornado or thunderstorm watch. Personally, I’m going to ignore it. These common annoyances have led some weather radio owners to simply unplug them so that they can get a decent night’s sleep. See the problem? Although weather radios can be useful in a real emergency, there is a huge probability that they simply desensitize their owners to the point, that they don’t even get plugged in anymore. It would be like working in a building that had the fire alarm going off every 20 minutes. You might jump up for the first couple alarms, but how many alarms have to go off before you say “screw it” and keep working.
Another issue with the weather radio paradigm is that you must subscribe your radio to a county (or multiple counties). In places like the state of Iowa, weather warnings are not considered county wide. They can activated for a portion of a county, however anyone subscribed to that county will receive the alert regardless of where they are located. Once again, causing a surplus of alerts.
So do you see the problems? The first is that there may be no alerting going on and the second is a alarm that is going off so often that folks don’t even want to pay attention anymore.
So what is the solution? Honestly, I have no idea.
In this day and age, it seems like we should be able to subscribe to alerts for our own cities rather than counties, but it seems it could cause a major technological issue.
A small project that I have been working on, it getting alerts delivered via social media such as twitter and Facebook. I already have a script that runs and pulls data from the Weather Underground API, and then pushes it up to Twitter. The only problem is, I’m not sure that if there is a tornado/thunderstorm warning for a part of my county, if weather underground will post it for all cities within the county. This would leave us stuck with the over alert issue.
Does anyone else have thoughts on this?