(Spirit Lake)– Today (Mon.) marks the kick off of “Severe Weather Awareness Week” in the state of Iowa. Special themes have been assigned to each day through the week, with today’s (Mon.) being severe thunderstorms. Dickinson County Emergency Management Coordinator Mike Ehret tells us what criteria is needed for a thunderstorm to be classified as severe…
“They have to have winds 58 mph or greater, or hail one inch diameter or larger. That’s what classifies a thunderstorm as being severe. And I want to emphasize, you know, higher on those winds because you look at the derecho that was a severe thunderstorm even though there were winds over 100 mph in that storm. That was not a tornado. It was a severe thunderstorm and so that would be just a severe thunderstorm warning. And I just want to impress on people that they need to take severe thunderstorm warnings seriously because just like we saw last year and what we saw here even back in 2010 in that storm, those were strong straight line winds of nearly 100 mph and they do a lot of damage, tornado like damage, but over a much broader area generally. So those need to be taken very seriously.”
Last year’s was a fairly quiet severe weather season for us locally. Ehret says he’s hoping people haven’t become complacent as a result…
“Like you said last year was a quiet year for us, not so much for central and eastern Iowa with the derecho they experienced there in August. So, you know, even if you have a relatively quiet year you know, it can take just one storm like that one to kind of wreck your year, so to speak.”
Tomorrow’s (Tues.) emphasis will be on warnings and the various ways to receive them, and what you should do when one is issued.
