Ah, spring. The time of the year when the weather alert radio goes off, or not, when severe weather threatens.
This month, we’ve had several rounds of severe weather in southwest Missouri, which is normal. Last year, severe storms knocked down a hella lotta trees up north in one storm and then down south here in another, leaving broad swaths of the region without power for days or weeks (our turn came at the end of June). This year, we had a round of heavy hail which devastated the north part of the city, and recently we had a round of storms that included an EF0 tornado that touched down briefly on the eastern end of Battlefield, the town that begins across the farm road from me.
On that occasion, my weather radio did not alert, but my beautiful wife was upstairs and heard the sirens instead. Nothing but heavy rain here, enough to keep the swimming pool kinda full (the fact that we need heavy rain to keep the pool full is a worry for another day).
Then, on Saturday night, the weather radio went off just before midnight. In the dark, I button-mashed the top of the radio, hoping to get the voice messages, but I didn’t hit the right combo in the darkness and opted for rousing my family and getting them downstairs where I could check the Internet, maybe.
But the Internet indicated the tornado warning was for Barry County, south of here. I went back upstairs to check the radio, and I had button-mashed the text of the alert away so all I could see was the red light and the incorrect date and time. A red light could be anything–flood warning, severe thunderstorm warning, nuclear attack–I’ve squelched the klaxon for all of these, leaving only the tornado warning to alarum and awaken us. We remained downstairs for a while–everyone else ended up sleeping down there. When I came upstairs, the amber light was on, indicating a watch of some sort.
As I was getting to sleep, my phone blared:
Jiminy crickets! I de-bleared my eyes to read it, and it’s an IMMINENT THREAT ALERT that the James River was flooding and fast.
Ah, but gentle reader. I am not close to the James River, and this was not an immediate threat to me trying to sleep in my dry bed at 2:00 in the morning.
So the warnings for Nogglestead have been off-kilter this year. I’ll check the radio to see if it’s somehow gotten set so that we’re in Barry County or something. My wife wondered if it was because our Starlink internet jumps around IPs so that location detection picks us up elsewhere, but this is a radio, the old-timey device. So it’s either a bad setting in the radio or the trainees at the weather service are hitting the wrong buttons.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep watching the skies. Except at night, when most of our tornado warnings happen.
And note this is the only time I really miss “cutting the cord.” When we had tornado warnings in the past, we could go downstairs and flip on the television and watch the KY3 wall-to-wall coverage with immediate updates. I’ve got the weather app and the news apps on my phone, but they’re pretty useless in these instances–and they rely on the Internet, which gets hinky in storms because it’s trying to beam to the satellites through the clouds. Still, I don’t miss it a couple thousand dollars a year’s worth.
