stock photo courtesy of Amazon.com
When considering communications gear, there are few things more cherished in my home than our Midland weather radio. More times than I can count, it has alerted us to dangerous weather conditions when we’d likely be otherwise unaware. That’s why this piece of gear rates highly on my list of “must haves” for the home!
It seems that in my experience, a lot of folks don’t understand the importance of a good weather radio. They think, “My cell phone will send me an alert,”, or, “I’ll turn on the TV or the radio when the weather looks like it’s getting ugly.” While these ideas do work sometimes, perhaps even most times, they don’t work ALL the time. And sometimes, one’s inattention to or ignorance of changing weather conditions can have deadly consequences.
Consider this story for a moment. It’s late January (or perhaps early February.) It’s 4:00 AM in southern Indiana. You’re sound asleep in your trailer home. The weather was fine when you went to bed, but it turned stormy after you went to bed for the night. A rare winter tornado develops, and it levels most of your trailer park. You come away with your life but little else. Some of your neighbors, however, aren’t so lucky.
I didn’t concoct that story in an effort to scare folks. It really did happen a few years back in my state. Several people were killed, and dozens of people experienced life-changing events that morning. Had those folks had weather radios that alert to severe weather watches and warnings for their area, perhaps some of those folks could have taken cover and been safer as the exceptionally rare tornadic storm blew through that morning.
NOAA alert radios are great because you program them to alert for your county, you add some batteries, you plug it in somewhere, and you forget it (until severe weather strikes.) When severe weather watches or warnings are issued by the National Weather Service, the radio will activate and you’ll be able to hear the details of the watch or the warning. And because the radio has batteries, the radio will alert during power outages. You can even store your radio in one place (ours stays in our bedroom so that we’ll hear it if it alerts at night) and carry it to your safe place during a severe weather event.
Almost every part of the country experiences some sort of severe weather at one time or another. Whether it’s floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, or severe winter weather, you’ll always know what to expect when you have a weather radio. We even went so far as to get a set of GMRS/FRS radios that have the alert feature for the weather band. That means that if we aren’t at home, we still have the ability to get real-time weather alerts without depending on computers or cellphone networks.
Very few folks in the U.S. live in an area that never receives any kind of severe weather. If you don’t have a weather radio, do yourself a favor and get one. I can’t stress their importance nearly enough. And to be honest, I’d much rather have someone yelling at me, “Sarah, I spent $30 on a weather radio and it never saved my life,”, instead of hearing stories like the one in southern Indiana where lives could have been saved had weather radios alerted these folks while they slept. I’d much rather have folks prove me wrong than become sad statistics.