Researchers believe that the 20-minute mark is the "flattening-out point" for a warning's effectiveness, because longer lead times don't appear to have an appreciable impact on casualty tolls. "We are inadvertently training people to not react when the sirens go off."Īs happened in Joplin on Sunday, forecasters are now able to give people a 20-minute warning of a tornado strike. "It's important that we cut down the false alarm rate," Smith says. About three-fourths of all tornado sirens are false alarms, according to a National Weather Service study. On Sunday, for example, tornado sirens went off in Lawrence, Kan., even though the area was outside the National Weather Service's tornado warning report. Smith calls it the "crying wolf" phenomenon. "Eating part of a worm will affect how you decide about eating apples for the rest of your life."īut the tornado warning system – and how it's applied by states and municipalities – may also be playing a role in affecting those attitudes. "It’s comparable to biting into an apple with a worm in it," he told the university's news service last year. "I talked to person after person who told me, 'Thank goodness someone is paying attention to the power outage.' "īob Drost, a researcher at Michigan State University's Geocognition Research Laboratory, found in a study last year that personal experience with damaging storms is a major factor in determining how people respond to tornado warnings. Smith, vice president of AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions, in Wichita, Kan. "There's excellent evidence that many, many people did not get the warning in Alabama," says Mr. Widespread power outages ahead of the Alabama tornadoes last month probably prevented many victims from getting TV and radio warnings, says Mike Smith, author of "Warnings: The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather." That raises a national security question, he says, about electric deregulation and its effect on the ability of utilities to restore power quickly. Yet researchers studying this spring's events are finding weaknesses in the overall ability of Americans to stay informed about looming tornadoes. "When an F4 or F5 tornado hits, there's not much you can do to change the outcome," Alabama Gov. Researchers have to go back to a massive 1974 tornado outbreak and then back to the 1930s to find storms of similar magnitude and impact. April saw a record-breaking 600 tornadoes spawn across the US, many of them powerful enough to crush houses and malls. The sheer power of the storm systems, which have been produced by unusual jet-stream dips bringing strong cold fronts into the Midwest and South, is the main factor in the death toll, researchers say. "After the Oklahoma City tornado in 1999, we were horrified by 36 people dying. "As big as these events have been, people are putting politics aside and asking questions they weren't willing to ask a year ago," says Kevin Simmons, an economist at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, who has studied tornado casualty tolls. Yet the stunning death tolls from tornadoes this spring raise new questions about government subsidies for storm shelters, the psychology of warning response, the possibility of limited tornado evacuations, and the argument that tornado warning and response should be considered a national security issue.
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