Tornado warning siren nearby?

[scostorms]

(I suppose a "dumb" thread... but shh)

I just saw on the news about a few cities in Ontario installing some sirens for severe weather so I just started thinking...

I wonder how many people take them serious, do they listen for them?

So, hence most of you are Americans, and I know a lot of USA cities have severe weather sirens, are you in a siren coverage area and do you listen to them when they sound? (Also, do you own a weather radio)



For me, no. I used to live in a town with a severe weather siren, it was only used once during a tornado warning. My family did take it serious, we went to the basement. I also own a broadband weather radio from Environment Canada.

[Brent]

Can't ignore it here... it's right across the street. I swear it wakes a dead person everytime it goes off.

Living down here, we get a lot of tornado warnings...

and yes... I have a NOAA Weather Radio with SAME capability.

[Persepone]

No siren coverage here. No other coherent warning system that I'm aware of. Local radio stations, etc. are also pretty useless since I think they run a bunch of them on some type of automated equipment.

We DO have NOAA weather radios--the plug in kind in the house (with battery backup so they work for some limited time when the power is out) AND each of us has a portable (cigarette pack size) NOAA weather radio. These go in cars, pocketbooks, on belt clips, etc. and have quite literally saved our lives/prevented potentially serious injury away from home. Mine lives in my purse. So sometimes it goes off unexpectedly at work, etc. but so far no one has ever complained.

I also have a portable radio (AM/FM/NOAA) that I use as a travel radio. But it does have NOAA weather radio built in and I tend to take it when I stay in hotels, etc.

My daughter has a flashlight with a built-in NOAA weather alert radio.

By the way, all these NOAA radios sound a pretty loud alert to warn you and it is loud enough to wake you up out of a very sound sleep.

I frequently give the portable NOAA alert radios as birthday presents, Christmas presents, etc. My friends think I'm nuts until they actually get alerted to something nasty headed their way. I've had friends who were on the beach with severe lightning headed toward them and others who were camping with flooding headed their way, so these little radios really are worth the batteries they consume.

[TexasStooge]

Got a topic started already started here:

http://www.storm2k.org/phpbb2/viewtopic ... highlight=

[scostorms]

Oh well, everything else on this board has six or seven topics for the same thing. Lets refresh everyones memory.

[wxmann_91]

Well, the search function is disabled these days.

[Skywatch_NC]

Don't have any tornado sirens in Raleigh...

Thank goodness for my NOAA radio in that regard!

Eric

[azskyman]

Our hometown installed warning sirens the springtime AFTER an F4 tornado ripped through town and killed 24 of our people (mostly kids) and injured more than 400. That was 38 years ago.

To this day, people DO take notice of the sirens, but I know that they do not all head for the basement or take shelter every time the siren goes off.

City officials, however, spend money every year if necessary to make sure that the sirens are in good working order and are part of the warning protocol in our home town.

And you can bet that the NEW New Orleans will have some kind of a levee alert system for many years to come also!