[tornado alarm sounds]
Mika Ellison: It sounds like it comes from everywhere. You hear it if you’re in class, walking on the sidewalk, or sitting inside with your window open. It sounds like the purge alarm, or if an ambulance siren was somehow massive and covered a mile radius.
[music – Stormy Weather?]
Evan Trotter-Wright: I remember being told about it freshman year, and people were it was always like a big thing. They would bring it up and be like, Oh, tornado siren, like this morning. Don’t freak out.
School of Comm senior Evan Trotter-Wright spent two years hearing the alarms every first Tuesday of the month at 10am. But unlike other Northwestern students, he has a unique way of interacting with them.
Evan Trotter-Wright: But then last year was the first year I lived off campus, and I just like, had the idea to, like, harmonize with it. And I did. I was, I was walking, like, towards the rock through the arch, and there was, like, nobody around, because it was like, right at 10….And since then, I’ve tried to to get myself outside for every first Tuesday.
The tornado alarms are an undeniable part of life in tornado country, which includes most of the middle of the country and can extend as far as Illinois and Alabama. But if you didn’t grow up with them, they can come with a lot of questions.
Evan Trotter-Wright: like, where are the speakers? Where does the sound come from? How is it so loud? How is it everywhere?
To answer some of these questions, and a few others, I spoke to meteorologist Harold Brooks about what tornado alarms are, how they fit into the emergency alert landscape, and where they come from.
[music]
Harold Brooks: so you’ve asked a ridiculously large question.
And he told me it all starts with one tornado, from March 18, 1925.
[1920s music]
Harold Brooks: The tri state tornado is a real watershed event in American consciousness about tornadoes.
The Tri State Tornado carved a deadly path across the US from Missouri to Illinois, and galvanized people enough that they started thinking about how to map and predict tornadoes. However, they would have to wait for a breakthrough in technology that didn’t happen until 1948.
Harold Brooks: At Tinker Air Force Base here in the Oklahoma City area, they have a, they have a, basically a brand new commander on the base who comes to the meteorologist and basically says, you know, I’m not very happy that, you know, I had a bunch of planes get damaged. You know, your guy’s job is to figure out how to tell me so that that doesn’t happen again. And he starts coming to daily weather briefings. And five days later, he’s there and there. And the two, these two guys, are going, well, you know, kind of looks a lot like last Thursday. And looking back at the weather maps, there was a genius level thought that these two, that these two events were similar. … And basically the general said, Well, why aren’t you forecasting tornadoes? Then he goes, Well, nobody forecasts tornadoes, and the response from the commanding general of the base is, gentlemen, you’re about to make history. And the base gets hit. And one of the guys who did the forecast said I had gone home and just felt like, what a fool I’ve made of myself. Takes a nap, wakes up from the nap, and there’s a new story about a tornado. He’s going, why are they talking about last week’s tornado? And then he finds out it’s actually happened to get and hit the base again. So they got assigned then to start forecasting around the country for tornado threats.
Tornado alarms have grown with the latest technology of the day, piggybacking off of telegrams and telegraph networks to broadcast television, and weather radios in the 1980s.
Today, the tornado warning system runs out of a system of 120 local Weather Service Offices (the Evanston one is in Romeoville, Illinois) that issue predictions for the day, tornado watch and tornado warnings, and the probability of other weather events like hail or high winds.
But what about those tornado sirens? How do they fit into the landscape of emergency alerts, and why on earth did a massive system of outdoor radios get built in the middle of America? It turns out, the cause was something even more potentially dangerous than a natural disaster.
Harold Brooks: What grew out of civil defense, for nuclear, for nuclear attack efforts, and that’s part of where the sirens come from. Is, you know, when they were originally intended, they were intended as “The Russians have just launched an attack.” And, you know, they didn’t get used for that. But so we started in the in the Midwest in particular, we started using them for as as, as Tornado, as notifications.
Meteorologist Mackenzie Krocak says that while tornado sirens may be the most visible or, audible, evidence of disaster warnings, they shouldn’t, and usually aren’t, the only way to learn about extreme weather.
Mackenzie: They’re really important system, because people do rely on them. You know, people kind of expect to hear them. But at least from the meteorology world, we really try to emphasize that you shouldn’t be relying solely on these sirens, because, you know, they are sometimes sounded manually, so someone has to actually go into an office or go to the siren and actually sound them. Some of them are automatic, but not all of them, and so there’s just a wide variety in how they work, in the policies that each city has to sound them, and so there’s a little bit of a lack of consistency.
The tornado siren’s locality is important: cities each maintain and control their own systems, leading to sometimes confusing and sometimes hilarious regional differences.
Harold Brooks: In Norman, we don’t blow the sirens if it’s a if it’s a home football game for the University of Oklahoma, because of visiting fans not necessarily knowing what that is.
But there’s a drawback to this locality: tornado sirens are expensive to maintain, and cities are the ones who have to do the maintenance. Mobile, Alabama phased out their siren warnings a few years ago, and Harvard, Illinois eliminated theirs in 2019. Other towns followed suit, citing innovations like social media and the many ways people can get information about natural disasters now, along with high costs. When the city of Evanston replaced several sirens in 2019, the total cost was estimated to be over $100,000.
But in natural disaster warnings, innovation and equity can be a matter of imminent life or death.
Harold Brooks: I think of it as a general ethics problem…, if A weak tornado is approaching a a suburban area that has ordinarily well built homes. Worst possible thing that can happen is pretty close to nothing, okay, yeah, whereas that same tornado approaching an area in rural Alabama where there are a lot of mobile homes and a lot of other stuff, it might be a deadly event. Now, do we issue the same product for those two different populations?
Social media and television have become easy ways to communicate natural disaster warnings, but tornado sirens still serve a purpose: for people who don’t have the resources for a phone or a TV, or who are caught outside, a siren can be their only warning.
Harold Brooks: most of the deaths, half the deaths in the US occur in mobile homes, mobile to manufactured homes, from tornadoes.
And if you don’t know what the sirens or your emergency alerts mean, they won’t be effective. Krocak also pointed out that research in emergency alerts often involves translation and communication.
Mackenzie: Joseph Trujillo Falcon is really a pioneer in this space, and we’ve discovered that even some of the words that we’re using to translate from English into Spanish do not resonate with people. And so, for example, we have a paper where we found that the term for a watch was actually indicating more urgency than the term for a warning [in Spanish], and that is not good. So we’re doing quite a bit of linguistic work with partners who are in that space to try to understand how we can create meaningful translations.
No matter how good the science is, the ultimate test of natural disaster warnings goes back to the message of the Tri-State Tornado — how many people can we save?
Mackenzie: the field has definitely moved into a space where we are now recognizing that we can have a perfect forecast, but if it’s not meaningful to people, that it’s not going to be useful, and so working really, really hard to make sure that our products and services that come from NOAA and the National Weather Service are accurate, of course, but also meaningful and useful, and that our forecasts are in spaces where people are looking for that information.
[music]
Emergency alert systems can sometimes feel like preparing for a disaster that will never actually happen. But Brooks ended with a story that demonstrated just how valuable a system that works is. It was May 20, 2013, and the Normal Regional Hospital system had an hour and a half advance notice before a destructive tornado would hit.
Harold Brooks: They had moved they had they had an incredible system, and it’s one of those. I wouldn’t have noticed it, but I but you know when, when they described it, it was brilliant. It was like they had little sticky dots, red, yellow or green, outside of every outside of every room, the kind of thing you wouldn’t really even notice, but all of their staff knew that green meant these were the safest locations in the hospital in case of a tornado, yellow were and red, where we really don’t want people in these rooms. And so even the custodial staff knew and if and when this and when they put out there, we’re doing our we’re putting in tornado procedures, if they saw someone who was not in a green area, they were to direct them into the green area.
In the short amount of time they had, the staff of the hospital moved nearly every patient into safe areas.
Brooks: And they got down to where they had one patient that they couldn’t move. They had moved everybody out of patient rooms that weren’t green, and the only person who didn’t move was a woman who was going into labor. And they took the mattresses from all the adjoining rooms and put them around all of the windows in her room and made her room a little cocoon, and she gave birth right about the time the tornado hit the hospital.
[music]
Maybe you hate being woken up by the blaring sirens once a month. Maybe you hum along. Maybe you’ve had no idea what they meant until now. Whatever rings true for you, organizations like NOAA and the National Weather Service will continue to develop, improve, and inform about the tornado alarms, so that no matter who you are or where you are, you’ll be able to stay safe.
Mika Ellison: For WNUR News, I’m Mika Ellison.
