When the National Weather Service interviewed people in Joplin, Missouri, where 158 people had died, they heard that most residents relied on community tornado sirens to learn of an approaching twister, and turned to other sources like friends or television for confirmation before seeking shelter.
The service concluded that shorter, more specific warnings would prompt more people to protect themselves, and the warnings went national in 2018 after a demonstration project in the South.
ist and a social scientist stationed in Oklahoma for the National Severe Storms Laboratory, is a skeptic about impact-based warnings, calling them “fear-based.”
“You can’t control people and force them into taking certain actions through fear,” Klockow McClain said, adding that warnings should include more specifics on what people should do, not just the impacts that could result from a storm.
While many people have the impression that residents ignore disaster warnings, her experiences interviewing survivors led her to a different conclusion.
“People are thinking about it, they’re looking for confirmation and trying to decide on the best course of action,” Klockow McClain said. “Sometimes meteorologists will criticize people for looking outside for a sign of the storm, but that’s a very natural instinct.”
Floods, tornadoes, wildfires and hurricanes killed 226 people last year, according to federal statistics.
There already have been 38 deaths from tornadoes and 67 from flooding this year; two-thirds of the flooding victims were in vehicles. They include 10 deaths in Texas, six in Kentucky and five in Missouri.
In recent years, the Wimberley floods in Texas contributed to a nationwide flooding-related death toll of 186 in 2015, and in 2017 Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, contributing to 182 deaths.
The new format for flood warnings comes as the National Weather Service revamps other warnings to make them shorter and more specific about damage. Starting Sept. 24, the service will cut back and simplify warnings on everything from fog to ice.
Impact-based warnings include more specifics to help people visualize what could happen — for instance, a severe hailstorm warning might say “people and animals outdoors will be severely injured,” said Gregory Schoor, severe storms leader for the National Weather Service.
But with the area’s history as part of Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley, residents are not complacent about the threat, Skidmore said. The county provides shelters in public schools for people who need them, like mobile home residents.
“People here are always looking at the sky and turning on the TV, and the news outlets here do a really good job of keeping people up to date and telling them what they need to do,” Skidmore said. “There’s no sense of complacency here.”
Familiarity breeds caution along flood-prone creeks in the North Carolina mountains, said David Vance, Avery County’s emergency management coordinator.
“People who live along these creeks watch very carefully and know when it’s time to get away,” said Vance, adding that the county has a “reverse 911” system to automatically call homes with flood alerts.
Even in the area south of Dublin, Texas, where the Ramirez tragedy unfolded in April, residents near the road know that heavy rain can cause treacherous floods, said Erath County’s emergency management coordinator, Susan Driskill.
After heavy rain the night before and a severe thunderstorm watch issued about 3 a.m. that day, state transportation workers had barricaded flooded roads, but the road Ramirez took had not yet flooded at that time, Driskill said.
The Ramirez family was coming from nearby Comanche County, making a special trip to a hospital where a dental operation with anesthesia was scheduled for one of the children, Driskill said.
“Those creeks can rise very quickly. Folks around here are aware of that,” said Driskill, adding that residents follow the county’s Facebook page for alerts and call her to report flooding or grass fires that threaten homes.
“They don’t like to evacuate. They’re going to stay with their property,” she said of the area’s residents, including many dairy farmers who make the county one of the state’s top milk producers.
Meteorologists have recently begun to recognize the need to sharpen weather predictions to get attention in areas where residents may not be used to life-threatening storms. Klockow McClain said social science-oriented meteorologists like herself are still in the “diagnosis phase” and don’t have all the answers yet on what will motivate people to act more consistently on unexpected disaster warnings.
Klockow McClain’s work is funded by the government and aimed at helping develop a future system of feedback from disaster survivors about the warnings they heard and how they reacted, she said. The Lee County, Alabama, emergency services director, Kathrine Carson, said she was surprised to hear some people may not have evacuated, since there were more people than usual in a church basement shelter near the hardest-hit area.
Keith Seitter, director of the American Meteorological Society, said meteorologists look to research like Klockow McClain’s for guidance on how to tailor future warnings for maximum effect.
“This is an issue for all meteorologists, and we take it very seriously,” Seitter said.
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