So, I was just checking the weather and noticed we were under a severe alert. Here’s what I saw:
I tried to get all my coworkers to go sit in the kitchen for seven minutes. Everybody seemed to like the idea, but nobody went through with it.
At any rate, I was wondering if it was things like this that determined when we would have tornado drills in school. I always kinda figured it was one of the cooler powers the principal had, but does anyone know if these Weather Service test warnings are what triggers a drill?
For a little over 20 years, I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma (buckle of Tornado Alley) and every so often the radio and television stations would do the whole speel with the annoying buzzer beeps “This is a Test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an actual emergency…” well, you know how it goes. Of course, throughout the high of tornado season (spring, summer and fall) every time a thunderstorm would roll through the area, the sirens would go off, and the television and radio stations would come on with warnings.
Doncha know that it wasn’t until about five years later (after I’d moved) that I realized that the annoying buzzer beeps with the Pretend Test of the Emergency Broadcast System and the annoying buzzer beeps with the Real Warning of the Emergency Broadcast System were the same thing? Somehow, I never put the two together.
Oh, and I should say that all my time in Tulsa, I never once saw, or was subjected to, a tornado. The one time when I thought it was close, I went out on my front porch to see it and saw every single neighbor doing exactally the same thing. Never did see it, but got to meet lots of neighbors that way.
My boss lived in Texas for 14 years. Once, there was a tornado warning, and there was much panic, as there usually is in Texas when weather happens. He frantically chivvied his wife and children into some sort of shelter, to assure their safety – and then he grabbed a beer and stood in front of his house staring at the sky. Eventually, his focus widened, and he realized that every house on the street had a beer-swilling dad standing out front, staring at the sky. He went back inside.
Thsi wasn’t what finally sent him back to California, though. His wife insisted, after she heard their oldest daughter say “it’s fixin’ to rain!”