Weather watch and warning systems have room for improvement | From the Roundtable

I recently wrote about severe weather and how over the years the greater Columbia area has been largely immune from such windy disturbances as the EF-5 tornado with winds up to 200 mph that devastated Joplin a few days ago. For the record, it’s the most devastating storm to hit a Missouri community since the St. Louis tornado May 27, 1896. According to my crude unscientific analysis, for Columbia, the sprawling Missouri River Valley that lies in an arc running from the southeast to northwest has formed enough of a terrain discontinuity to either deflect or significantly weaken tornado-spawning weather cells moving in, particularly from the southwest.
Such complacency is, of course, purely fallacious idiocy. The first tornado I remember hearing about killed more than 100 people when it raged through Worcester, Mass., on June 9, 1953, a locale hundreds of miles from so-called “tornado alley.” From then on, dark clouds to me were portents of a much-to-be-feared tornado, even though where I grew up it was a series of killer hurricanes in the 1950s that inflicted the most damage.
With something like a quarter of the city of Joplin — located 175 air miles southwest of Columbia — laid to waste as the death and injury count continues to rise, I remain concerned about our area’s weather watch and warning methodology and ways to improve it. The myriad public safety and medical agencies do a good job overall. Of particular interest now is the role played by two Internet sites, Twitter and Facebook, and how I believe they will eventually dominate the way information is dispersed and received before, during and after emergencies.
People trade stories about the weather, but one question always comes up: Where does one turn when warning sirens go off? Although radio and television stations compete vigorously for attention in the weather advisory and warning arena, most of us are understandably blasé about what goes on behind the scenes. The range and depth of severe weather coverage is broad, from outlets that provide continuous coverage to others that almost consider coverage of emergencies a distraction. Because some facilities are automated and typically unmanned at night and on weekends, these outlets may be faced with the double whammy of going off the air because there’s no backup power if the main supply cuts out.
The safety and welfare of the public during any emergency situation cries out for the best warning and advisory system that money can provide. A few weeks ago, I mentioned using cell phones to alert subscribers about emergencies in specific areas only to subsequently learn that a pilot project to do this was underway in the Greater New York area. For the time being, though, we have Twitter and Facebook, and it’s my wish that our public safety agencies do all they can do to utilize this twin juggernaut.
A wish list
1. Columbia-Boone County Joint Communications should go deep with Twitter and utilize it for minimally worded emergency announcements including weather watches, warnings, bulletins, advisories and so forth. Allied Facebook pages should be developed to become the nexus for all communications among participants with links to a plethora of relevant agencies and their sites, including the American Red Cross and the Central Missouri Food Bank.
2. Joint Comm should create a system similar to what in California is known as “SigAlert.” The technology has been in place here somewhat crudely since the mid-1980s for a robust system of communicating emergency information to area media outlets patterned after what has existed in California since September 1955. Broadcast “SigAlert” bulletins join the local lexicon as public advisories of situations ranging from auto accidents to reports of missing children.
3. A fanciful, cockeyed idea perhaps, but what about a weather “war room” in the midst of the Joint Comm facility as a place where selected media outlets can do live broadcasts? Joint Comm would gain access to weather radar from competing outlets, and participants from each outlet would broadcast live from the facility. Teamwork might seem a rough idea in the scrappy, highly competitive world of broadcasting, but it’s the safety of the public we’re talking about, and that should be of transcendent importance.
4. Finally, it’s time for some horn tooting! Joint Comm and the agencies it supports through communications are doing a great job, but we need to know more about its operation as well as what’s to come. Joint Comm has a good story to tell, so let’s know more about what’s going on.
While we pray for Joplin’s recovery, let’s not forget that tornadoes are capricious events. The Southridge tornado that hit Columbia in November 1998 woke us up. Now we should analyze, perfect and coordinate as best we can to be prepared if such a horrendous calamity ever visits us.