(Spirit Lake)– Severe Weather Awareness Week is going on this week and the focus today (Tues.) is on warnings. Dickinson County Emergency Management Coordinator Mike Ehret says it’s important to have a plan in place and even more so to actually implement it when a severe thunderstorm or even a tornado warning is issued…
“That means it’s about to happen or is, so that is definitely time for people to take action to seek shelter. As far as getting those warnings, there’s numerous ways to get warnings. Radio, t.v., our Dickinson Alert System. If you sign up for that you’ll get a text message and an email when those warnings come out. The we alerts that come out for the tornado warnings and the higher end flash flood warnings, make sure those are activated on your phone. You know, there’s just so many different ways. Weather radio, of course, is the one that everybody should have in their homes especially for storms that come through overnight. For some people it’s not too difficult to sleep through a storm and, you know, you could have a good storm come through and not even know it and you were in a warning and didn’t even realize it. But if you have that weather radio, as annoying as some people think they are, it serves a purpose and that’s to wake you up in the middle of the night to alert you to a warning.”
There will also be a big change in an annual event that’s taken place in the past during Severe Weather Awareness Week. Ehret says there will NOT be a statewide tornado drill tomorrow (Wednesday)…
“In the past the weather service has done a test tornado watch at 10:00 am and then at 10:10 they would follow it up or so with a test tornado warning. This year they’ve opted not to do that. They’re just going to do a message at 11:00 am through their regular weekly test. We here in Dickinson county and even in some other counties are still going to do the test tornado watch at 10:00 am and we’re going to follow that up with a test warning at 10:10. We’re going to send that out through our Dickinson Alert system. So if you’re signed up for that you’ll get those messages. But I feel it’s important we still go through the process of a watch and then a warning. It’s beneficial for the public, it’s good for businesses and schools that are going to participate in their plans and sheltering and so forth.”
Ehret says doing the drill is also valuable training for the county’s 911 emergency dispatchers.
