Monday, August 26, 2013

A Weather Ready City/Nation? - Round 2

In an earlier blog, I mentioned some of the issues regarding what it would take to be truly 'weather ready' but I need to return to this topic and bring up some other topics.  In that blog, I was mostly focused on how the public has to accept some share of the responsibility to be ready for weather disasters.  However, I think the whole notion of 'weather readiness' has been seriously diluted in the NOAA criteria for a community to be deemed 'weather ready'

It's clear that having a plan is not the equivalent of being prepared.  That is, one might well have a plan, but if its components are analyzed, it may well be flawed, even to the extent that it's wholly inadequate.  I've seen examples of local school plans for tornado preparedness that involve evacuating the children to 'shelter' locations that actually are quite vulnerable.  In such plans, they may have an inadequate shelter location and at the same time, have an adequate shelter that's not being used for that purpose.  A 'trained spotter' is not necessarily a reliable spotter - in fact, from what I've seen, the majority of spotters are probably not reliable.  Having attended a slide show or having seen a video doesn't mean the spotter is fully prepared to do the difficult and thankless task of storm spotting.  Some folks just never seem to be available when it counts the most.  I've been storm chasing for 40 years and I still encounter things I've never seen before - just how much actual spotting experience with real storms do spotters have?

I could go on at length providing examples of deficiencies, but my point is that having a plan is just a single step above not having any plan at all.  Preparedness plans and shelter locations need to be reviewed and vetted by someone who knows enough to detect flaws and inadequacies.  Civil engineers may need to become involved in evaluation of structural integrity. 

The NWS is currently in the process of trying to make their warnings more effective.  This necessarily can't be done by NWS bureaucrats and weather forecasters - they lack the education and training to do such things properly.  Partnerships with social scientists need to be established (and funded!) to develop collaborative programs for incorporating social science into the process of developing effective forecasts.  And it can't be done with a token social scientist sitting in some cubicle in an NWS building.  Furthermore, such an effort isn't of the sort that it can be done once and then it's done - it has to be an ongoing process indefinitely.  As our society and its technology change, the questions need to be asked over and over again:  Is the current system as effective as it needs to be?  What do we have to do to maintain and improve its effectiveness?  It's not at all clear to me that the NWS comprehends what will be necessary if they truly want to involve social sciences in a meaningful way.

Communities need to review and if necessary, create and/or revise severe weather plans for every business, school, church, shopping center, theater, hospital, day-care center, retirement home, etc. in their domain.  The people doing such reviews, as noted above, need to know what they're doing, and not be some functionary who's only doing it as an 'additional duty' on top of their full-time job responsibilities.  Communities need to review their spotter programs, and kick unreliable spotters off their rolls - an undependable spotter is no help at all.  Media weather broadcasters need to live up to their community service obligations and put the ratings battle aside when severe weather breaks, providing meaningful information rather than disseminating falsehoods such as "If you're not underground, you won't survive this!".  In large metropolitan areas with many communities, they need to foster a spirit of cooperation for the benefit of all, and not let petty egos and local political squabbles keep them from this ideal.

The pitiful level of structural integrity in American homes is exacerbated by the widespread absence of adequate storm shelters - i.e., capable of protecting the occupants in even and EF-5 tornado with some high confidence level.  Building codes in the tornado-prone areas of the nation (at least everything east of the continental divide!) should uniformly be equal to the standards imposed on buildings along hurricane-prone coastlines.  Enforcement of building codes is presently pathetic.  In walking tornado damage paths, it's depressingly common to see blatant code violations even with the very lenient codes now in effect.  These structural weaknesses increase the debris load in tornadoes moving through populated areas, thereby increasing the hazards to life and property.

I could go on, and perhaps will in later blogs, but the main message here is that having a 'storm ready' designation doesn't mean your community is truly prepared for storms!  It's a nice certificate you can hang in city hall or your local EOC, but it's no guarantee that everyone in the community is truly ready and safe.  If there's some consensus that we should seek to be a weather ready nation, as more and more weather-related disasters occur, this goal will not be achieved in reality when every community has such a plaque on the wall.  It's going to take a lot more resources and a lot more time than most people realize.  Including many of those pushing the 'weather ready' agenda.

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