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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

Evidence you have never lived in the midwest. When I lived there, the tornado sirens would sometimes give you up to 15 minutes of warning that they one was likely in your area. This is not hurricanes where you have a weeks notice.

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I'm visiting family right now about 70 miles north of the Mayfield tornado touchdown and we had severe weather warnings a couple of days before the storm.

That morning the TV news had a map over the local "heartland" area (Southern Illinois, Southeast Missouri, Northern Kentucky and Southwest Indiana) showing likely severe impacts with likely tornadoes.

So, they knew the risk was there. That said, nobody that grows up here expected that big of a storm in December. It isn't "tornado season" so a lot of folks didn't take it seriously. I know didn't take it too seriously and I've been through an F4 tornado as a kid that did a lot of damage to my town (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion,_Illinois_tornado_outbr...).

Yes, they knew the risk was there, but when these warnings are hundreds of miles across and tornadoes are essentially razor blades going across this warning zone, are you supposed to just stop everything?

The people who died in their homes: what if they had gone to work and been spared? We only hear about the deaths, but people working or going to school during storms (anyone remember Moore, OK?) happen.

Yes, everyone remembers Moore where a school was hit sometime in the 2000's with fatalities because there was no tornado shelter, and the good citizens of Moore voted against tornado shelters, consequently there were more fatalities when another tornado hit in 2013. It shows that proper building codes and proper code enforcement is needed.

>Yes, they knew the risk was there, but when these warnings are hundreds of miles across and tornadoes are essentially razor blades going across this warning zone, are you supposed to just stop everything?

Yes.

OR! at the least! not force your employees to come in at the threat of firing if they don't.

Let them have the freedom to choose their own personal risk factor.

> are you supposed to just stop everything?

Well, it would be a different matter if these factories and warehouses had tornado shelters that were fit for purpose.

After all, it would be pretty absurd to believe that extreme weather is so common that factories and warehouses need to keep working through it; and yet at the same time so uncommon that factories and warehouses don't need adequate shelters.

> extreme weather is so common

Threats of extreme weather are common, but the number of storms that are truly deadly or cause destruction of this magnitude can be a bit over-hyped.

The truth is most people get notifications about warnings and then nothing happens and over time they shrug it off or don't take it seriously.

While that can still be true, lead times have gotten much better in general, and Mayfield actually had over 2.5 hours of warning from KPAH[0], which is remarkable. But 45 mins or more seems to be the norm these days, at least in my general observations. Local authorities choosing to sound the alarms as soon as the warnings are issued is perhaps another matter.

Edit: Someone else commented elsewhere that the current average lead time on TOR warnings is 9 minutes, so I stand corrected. Some of this probably depends on the storm mode associated with the tornado.

For a supercell, the radar signatures are pretty clear and distinct, so it’s easier to provide earlier warnings. A tornado embedded in a QLCS is more difficult to detect, so I’d expect advanced notification to be more difficult.

[0] See, e.g., https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-critical-gap-in-tor...

Tornado sirens are generally triggered by tornado warnings, which require confirmation of a tornado (either by visual confirmation of tornado, or more frequently, the telltale signs on radar). The blog post you cite talks about sufficient evidence to drive severe storm warnings or tornado watches, which are events that can happen close to weekly for some locations--too frequent to be used for tornado sirens.

It should be obvious that the text from the KPAH tweet at 7:03 is not your run-of-the-mill SVR warning or TOR watch (which aren’t issued by tweet, anyway). It was a very clear alert that a storm that had already produced a visibly-confirmed and dangerous tornado was heading toward that location. NWS offices don’t tweet out that kind of language that far in advance unless they are certain about it. They weren’t going to trigger an actual warning at that point, as there was still time for the storm to lift or dissipate, but when they finally did trigger the PDS warning for Mayfield[0] at 9:05, it had been clearly signaled beforehand that that storm was on the way and that it was serious.

So, no, local authorities aren’t going to sound the sirens based on a tweet over two hours in advance of an event (nor was anyone suggesting they should have done), but emergency managers should have been well aware in advance of the first warning issuance that a very dangerous tornado was on its way.

[0] https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/vtec/#2021-O-NEW-KPAH-TO-W...

It was pointed out to me above that the 2.5 hour figure is spurious. (Cliff Mass apparently didn’t account for the fact that time stamps on tweets display the time of the tweet in the reader’s local time zone, not in the OP’s—or OT’s in this case.) So, NWS Paducah tweeted that alert at 9:03 CST, effectively contemporaneous with their issuance of the PDS warning. Still a pretty good lead time for a TOR warning, but nothing like hours of notice. In any case, I stand corrected on that.

That much warning time is an eternity and people who may be in the target zone may end up getting nothing.

When the Joplin tornado hit, we lived "in the path" of where it was expected to go (tracking WSW)/ We hunkered down... but the storm ended up going 15 miles south of us. This was just in a short period of time (maybe 20 minutes).

A lot can change in hours. Storms can dissipate or strengthen with frightening speed. Directions can change.

Right, which is why KPAH didn’t issue an actual warning until 9:05. Giving people a strongly-worded heads-up a couple of hours in advance via tweet gets the word out to emergency managers and other interested parties who can then disseminate that information as the situation develops. Once it becomes clear the tornadic cell hasn’t weakened or deviated, then you can trigger the actual alert systems. But I don’t think anyone can argue that no one had any idea what was coming until minutes in advance.

They had 2 days of warning, not 2.5 hours.

This was so obviously going to be a troublesome weather day that the local tv stations had canceled previously scheduled scheduling for the day after and replaced it with news.

Everybody knew some shit was gonna go down.

At the very least giving your employees the option of staying home without fear of reprisal is minimum necessary for a clear conscience.

I saw amazon was hit in this storm, knowing somebody who got fired for calling out because a tree blocked the only road out of their area, I guarantee there were people who only showed up because they feared being fired and they wanted to stay home during this but couldn't.

Companies need to answer for those lives.

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