So, we’re really trusting WW2 era technology to save people.

    Yes, the tornado sirens you hear is technology that was installed to warn you of air raids in the emergency of a German invasion, during the 1950’s the were used to warn of a impending nuclear launch. It wasn’t till the 1970’s they were implemented for tornado warnings or severe weather. 

These sirens were never meant to warn people in buildings. They were meant to warn those outside to get into a place of shelter. Especially true for today, when we all watch tv or a service for our entertainment. Everyone now owns a pair of headphones or a tv with a loud audio, you’ll never hear those sirens going off until it’s knocking on your door. Especially at night; we all sleep with differently. But I promise you that siren at night will not alert you like it should; especially with breathing machines, fans, or white noise machines. We should not be relying on a siren which is barely audible during the day to wake us up at night.

    Why do we use sirens still? I have no clue. The amount of false warnings and reliance on these systems contribute to deaths and injury’s every year, and every siren that goes off and no bad weather comes creates this false idea of either “it’s never gotten as bad as they said it would” or “every time I go down there it’s for nothing”. THIS HAS TO STOP. Personally I see it a lot, and each time I want to tell those people to just wait until it hits you, then you’ll understand it’s better to be over prepared then underprepared. A tornado can strike anywhere, doesn’t matter if there’s hills, valleys, lakes or streams; big cities and small towns.

So what do we do? Weather radios and these handy little devices called cellphones. We need to ditch the old school technology and embrace than nearly everyone has a phone. Yes we have WEA Alerts, the alerts that are automatically pushed to your phone and that is often used for amber alerts. Those damn alerts will wake me up like no clock could dream of, they’ll wake the dead. Unfortunately you still can’t count on these, they can be easily turned off or sometimes just don’t work.  And for the case with weather radio’s, they’re old. They need a major update from county based systems to the new polygon system in order to cut down on false alarms or over alarming. I also ask you this question. Do you have a weather radio? Because if you do your the minority. Tornadoes are rare, and the likelihood of you being caught in one are slim to none. So buying these things aren’t a huge priory in peoples lives, and that’s if the person can afford it. We have many communities below the poverty line, and this is unfortunately how people die. They don’t have enough money to afford a 30 dollar weather radio, and maybe they can’t even afford tv. We need to have a education campaign to fix these issues. Did you know that you can still pick up your local tv station with just a regular antenna? Or that apps like Red Cross tornado work wonders, they warn you when you are in a warning polygon.