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The Final Link in the Integrated Warning System

December 27, 2012 by tornado Leave a Comment

As Christmas Day twilight descended on Mobile, AL, so did a supercell bearing a significant (EF2) tornado shown in the video below.

The tornado looks like a violent wedge; but fortunately for the residents of Mobile, it wasn’t as intense as it looked. The huge apparent size was related to the low cloud base above the condensation funnel, making the tornado seem fatter than it was. Maximum path width was “only” 200 yards, according to the NWS Mobile damage survey (map).

Nonetheless, this tornado had the potential to cause mass causalities, moving through such a densely populated area. Were the very same event to happen in the 1950s or before, when tornado forecasting and warning were primitive to nonexistent, I safely can surmise there would have been scores of deaths. Perhaps some of the lack of deaths and injuries in Mobile was pure serendipity. It probably helped that most businesses were closed, and being Christmas, fewer folks were out and about than usual for that hour of a weekday. However, I’d like to attribute much of that “good luck” to the success of what legendary severe-weather scientist and forecaster Al Moller long ago termed the Integrated Warning System.

The Integrated Warning System is the entire hazard-notification and response process, composed not only of the NWS (from advanced outreach to outlooks to watches to warnings), but also private and media meteorologists, storm spotters, emergency management, law enforcement and all users of severe-weather information. The last and most crucial link in the Integrated Warning System is each individual, who ultimately bears the responsibility for his/her own weather awareness and preparedness.

If any link in that chain breaks, the Integrated Warning System can fail. Bad forecasts can lead to a breakdown, as can hardware or software failures of radar and warning equipment systems, or a lack of competent and well-positioned storm spotters, or inadequate preparation by state, county and local entities tasked with risk reduction. Even if every function works well right down to the individual citizen, the Integrated Warning System still breaks down when the person(s) being warned do not received the warning, or ignore it, or don’t prepare for the potential emergency.

That brings me to the following video, a collection of snippets from security cameras at a Walgreen’s drug store in Mobile.

I find this footage simultaneously fascinating, disappointing and nearly miraculous. Over the last several years, fortuitously placed security cameras have allowed us to get inside tornadoes safely to better appreciate their destructive power and flow characteristics. They also have shown how folks who easily could have been hurt or killed somehow escaped serious injury. That was the case here.

Without contacting them and performing surveys and interviews, it’s not possible to get inside the heads of those in that store and presume their motivations for being there at that time, and the reasons for being so obviously unprepared and unaware of impending danger. We only can see that they were.

It is fair to wonder, “why?” It’s not as if residents of the area should have been unaware that tornadoes can happen there in December. After all, another damaging tornado cut a path through the same city just five days before. The Christmas Day severe weather threat was noted in both local weather discussions and national outlooks several days out and on into the same day. The area had been under a PDS (particularly dangerous situation) tornado watch for four hours, and was under a highest-level (“tornado emergency”) form of warning from NWS Mobile. This tornado absolutely, positively did not “hit without warning” in a literal sense! Yet it’s clear that some either didn’t comprehend the danger or chose to ignore it.

Clearly much work remains to be done on the social-science side of the Integrated Warning System to reduce the level of misunderstanding and unawareness of severe weather threats. I say “reduce” and not “eliminate”, pragmatically realizing that the flip side of our freedoms as individuals in this nation include the right to be as unprepared as we wish, and that some unfortunately will exercise that freedom. Meanwhile I’m thankful the event was nowhere nearly as terrible as it could have been!

Filed Under: Weather Tagged With: awareness, Christmas tornado, Integrated Warning System, Mobile AL, Mobile Alabama, Mobile tornado, outlooks, preparedness, severe storms, severe weather, tornado forecasting, tornado preparedness, tornado safety, tornado video, tornado warning, tornado warnings, tornado watch, tornado watches, tornadoes, warnings, watches

Christmas Values from Pioneer America

December 24, 2012 by tornado Leave a Comment

Around home and hearth tonight, families (where they still exist) gather to celebrate the physical birth of our Savior, a joyous occasion regardless of the actual calendar date of his birth or the demoralizing state of the materialistic, cynical, idol-making societal world around us. It’s easy to get discouraged by the news we see and hear on a daily basis, but important to overcome that with a longer-term (think eternal!) worldview that assures us of who ultimately is guaranteed to prevail in the struggle of good and evil.

Through the fog of all the tumult and human mayhem we’ve seen, we still and always can look to the guiding light who came to earth in a stable, under the glow of an eastern star, bearing a gift infinitely more valuable than any mere stuff. That’s why it’s called Christmas.

Tonight I’ll offer atypically few of my own words, instead reprinting below an oft-reproduced yet timeless tale from the early American heartland, a story manifesting selfless virtue, a parable of what this season can mean when we mellow hardened attitudes and transcend selfish motivations. One source for the following story is, Tears in My Heart, compiled by James Collins, but the author is anonymous. If you’ve read it before, it’s a good time to revisit; and if not, enjoy the discovery! Merry Christmas…

—————————————————-
Pa never had much compassion for the lazy or those who squandered their means and then never had enough for the necessities. But for those who were genuinely in need, his heart was as big as all outdoors. It was from him that I learned the greatest joy in life comes from giving, not from receiving.

It was Christmas Eve 1881. I was fifteen years old and feeling like the world had caved in on me because there just hadn’t been enough money to buy me the rifle that I’d wanted so bad that year for Christmas.

We did the chores early that night for some reason. I just figured Pa wanted a little extra time so we could read in the Bible. So after supper was over I took my boots off and stretched out in front of the fireplace and waited for Pa to get down the old Bible. I was still feeling sorry for myself and, to be honest, I wasn’t in much of a mood to read scriptures.

But Pa didn’t get the Bible, instead he bundled up and went outside. I couldn’t figure it out because we had already done all the chores. I didn’t worry about it long though, I was too busy wallowing in self-pity.

Soon Pa came back in. It was a cold clear night out and there was ice in his beard. “Come on, Matt,” he said. “Bundle up good, it’s cold out tonight.” I was really upset then. Not only wasn’t I getting the rifle for Christmas, now Pa was dragging me out in the cold, and for no earthly reason that I could see.

We’d already done all the chores, and I couldn’t think of anything else that needed doing, especially not on a night like this. But I knew Pa was not very patient at one dragging one’s feet when he’d told them to do something, so I got up and put my boots back on and got my cap, coat, and mittens. Ma gave me a mysterious smile as I opened the door to leave the house. Something was up, but I didn’t know what.

Outside, I became even more dismayed. There in front of the house was the work team, already hitched to the big sled. Whatever it was we were going to do wasn’t going to be a short, quick, little job. I could tell. We never hitched up the big sled unless we were going to haul a big load.

Pa was already up on the seat, reins in hand. I reluctantly climbed up beside him. The cold was already biting at me. I wasn’t happy. When I was on, Pa pulled the sled around the house and stopped in front of the woodshed. He got off and I followed. “I think we’ll put on the high sideboards,” he said. “Here, help me.” The high sideboards! It had been a bigger job than I wanted to do with just the low sideboards on, but whatever it was we were going to do would be a lot bigger with the high sideboards on.

When we had exchanged the sideboards Pa went into the woodshed and came out with an armload of wood—the wood I’d spent all summer hauling down from the mountain, and then all fall sawing into blocks and splitting. What was he doing? Finally I said something. “Pa,” I asked, “what are you doing?” ”

You been by the Widow Jensen’s lately?” he asked. The Widow Jensen lived about two miles down the road. Her husband had died a year or so before and left her with three children, the oldest being eight.

Sure, I’d been by, but so what? “Yeah,” I said, “why?”

“I rode by just today,” Pa said. “Little Jakey was out digging around in the woodpile trying to find a few chips. They’re out of wood, Matt.” That was all he said and then he turned and went back into the woodshed for another armload of wood. I followed him.

We loaded the sled so high that I began to wonder if the horses would be able to pull it. Finally, Pa called a halt to our loading, then we went to the smoke house and Pa took down a big ham and a side of bacon. He handed them to me and told me to put them in the sled and wait. When he
returned he was carrying a sack of flour over his right shoulder and a smaller sack of something in his left hand.

“What’s in the little sack?” I asked.

“Shoes. They’re out of shoes. Little Jakey just had gunny sacks wrapped around his feet when he was out in the wood-pile this morning. I got the children a little candy too. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without a little candy.”

We rode the two miles to Widow Jensen’s pretty much in silence. I tried to think through what Pa was doing. We didn’t have much by worldly standards. Of course, we did have a big woodpile, though most of what was left now was still in the form of logs that I would have to saw into blocks and split before we could use it. We also had meat and flour, so we could spare that, but I knew we didn’t have any money, so why was Pa buying them shoes and candy? Really, why was he doing any of this? Widow Jensen had closer neighbors than us. It shouldn’t have been our concern.

We came in from the blind side of the Jensen house and unloaded the wood as quietly as possible, then we took the meat and flour and shoes to the door.

We knocked. The door opened a crack and a timid voice said, “Who is it?”

“Lucas Miles, Ma’am, and my son, Matt. Could we come in for a bit?”

Widow Jensen opened the door and let us in. She had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. The children were wrapped in another and were sitting in front of the fireplace by a very small fire that hardly gave off any heat at all.

Widow Jensen fumbled with a match and finally lit the lamp. “We brought you a few things, Ma’am,” Pa said and set down the sack of flour. I put the meat on the table. Then Pa handed her the sack that had the shoes in it. She opened it hesitantly and took the shoes out on a pair at a time. There was a pair for her and one for each of the children—sturdy shoes, the best, shoes that would last.

I watched her carefully. She bit her lower lip to keep it from trembling and then tears filled her eyes and started running down her cheeks. She looked up at Pa like she wanted to say something, but it wouldn’t come out.

“We brought a load of wood too, Ma’am,” Pa said, then he turned to me and said, “Matt, go bring enough in to last for awhile. Let’s get that fire up to size and heat this place up.”

I wasn’t the same person when I went back out to bring in the wood. I had a big lump in my throat and, much as I hate to admit it, there were tears in my eyes too.

In my mind I kept seeing those three kids huddled around the fireplace and their mother standing there with tears running down her cheeks and so much gratitude in her heart that she couldn’t speak. My heart swelled within me and a joy filled my soul that I’d never known before. I had given at Christmas many times before, but never when it had made so much difference.

I could see we were literally saving the lives of these people. I soon had the fire blazing and everyone’s spirits soared. The kids started giggling when Pa handed them each a piece of candy and Widow Jensen looked on with a smile that probably hadn’t crossed her face for a long
time. She finally turned to us. “God bless you,” she said. “I know the Lord himself has sent you. The children and I have been praying that he would send one of his angels to spare us.”

In spite of myself, the lump returned to my throat and the tears welled up in my eyes again. I’d never thought of Pa in those exact terms before, but after Widow Jensen mentioned it I could see that it was probably true. I was sure that a better man than Pa had never walked the earth. I started remembering all the times he had gone out of his way for Ma and me, and many others. The list seemed endless as I thought on it.

Pa insisted that everyone try on the shoes before we left. I was amazed when they all fit and I wondered how he had known what sizes to get. Then I guessed that if he was on an errand for the Lord that the Lord would make sure he got the right sizes.

Tears were running down Widow Jensen’s face again when we stood up to leave. Pa took each of the kids in his big arms and gave them a hug. They clung to him and didn’t want us to go. I could see that they missed their pa, and I was glad that I still had mine.

At the door Pa turned to Widow Jensen and said, “The Mrs. wanted me to invite you and the children over for Christmas dinner tomorrow. The turkey will be more than the three of us can eat, and a man can get cantankerous if he has to eat turkey for too many meals. We’ll be by to get you about eleven. It’ll be nice to have some little ones around again. Matt, here, hasn’t been little for quite a spell.” I was the youngest. My two older brothers and two older sisters were all married and had moved away. Widow Jensen nodded and said, “Thank you, Brother Miles. I don’t have to say, “‘May the Lord bless you,’ I know for certain that He will.”

Out on the sled I felt a warmth that came from deep within and I didn’t even notice the cold. When we had gone a ways, Pa turned to me and said, “Matt, I want you to know something. Your ma and me have been tucking a little money away here and there all year so we could buy that rifle for you, but we didn’t have quite enough. Then yesterday a man who owed me a little money from years back came by to make things square. Your ma and me were real excited, thinking that now we could get you that rifle, and I started into town this morning to do just that. But on the way I saw little Jakey out scratching in the woodpile with his feet wrapped in those gunny sacks and I knew what I had to do. So, Son, I spent the money for shoes and a little candy for those children. I hope you understand.”

I understood, and my eyes became wet with tears again. I understood very well, and I was so glad Pa had done it. Just then the rifle seemed very low on my list of priorities. Pa had given me a lot more. He had given me the look on Widow Jensen’s face and the radiant smiles of her three children.

For the rest of my life, whenever I saw any of the Jensens, or split a block of wood, I remembered, and remembering brought back that same joy I felt riding home beside Pa that night. Pa had given me much more than a rifle that night, he had given me the best Christmas of my life.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: Christ, Christmas, Christmas Eve 1881, generosity, holiday, holidays, manger, savior, selflessness, service

Doublespeak 2012

December 21, 2012 by tornado Leave a Comment

Orwell had it half-wrong. The Ministry of Truth wouldn’t be the future of 1984, but instead 2012 and beyond. Yet our Animal Farm culture would be rather recognizable to him.

An ill-defined era, likely flickering to embers sometime between the terminus of the Reagan administration in 1988 and the mass commercialization (and resultant dumbing down) of the Internet in the mid-1990s, featured a majority of American people actually being fluent in national and world issues instead of marginally coherent servants to their 10-second attention spans. The rampant profusion of misspelling, sloppy usage, bad grammar and haphazard linguistic gibberish–seen constantly in online fora and comments, and more commonly than ever in journalism–is but a symptom of the illness, rather than the disease itself.

The productivity ethos isn’t, “A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.” Instead it is planned obsolescence.

The civic ethos isn’t, “Ask not what your country can do for you…”, but rather, “Here we are now, entertain us”, or feed us, or medicate us, give us free stuff, or pay for the fruits of my irresponsible behaviors.

Yes, sociopolitically, we know more but understand less, thanks to information overload, an appalling absence of education in civic responsibility, and deepening cultural emphasis on self-centered and secular worldviews that lack accountability to a higher authority than manifestly imperfect humans.

Don’t believe me? Believe instead the results of the aforementioned trends. To wit, ask any random 100 U.S. college students to identify both members of the following photo pair. Next, tabulate the fraction who could identify only the woman on the right. [If you’re reading this and can’t name her, you’re part of the problem!]

As Bill Engvall is wont to say, “There’s your sign.” Who of the two is vastly more crucial to world affairs? It’s not the one most readily identifiable to the prevailing culture of self-as-demigod, “What’s in it for me?” and, “If it feels good, do it”!

How else can I explain the slow-drip hoodwinking of such vast numbers of the populace–many otherwise intelligent and well-meaning, by purveyors of leftist Utopian dogma? Only the inertia of the Greatest Generation’s civic literacy, to the extent it has survived passage through ever-more-shallow successions of their offspring, precludes complete domination of spin over truth, euphemism over forthrightness, ambiguity over clarity. In that vein, I offer the following exemplary nuggets of modern American doublespeak, representing what Thomas Sowell described as,”using lofty words to obscure tawdry realities”. Blame not the carrier of the message for its pathetic reality…

What they say

What it really means…

Journalism

1. Heavily feature every real or made-up misdeed of the right or Christian;
2. Ignore the real misdeeds of the left or secular, except when convenient for producing isolated, token counter-examples of “fairness”.

Quantitative easing
Devaluing our already declining fiat currency, the dollar, by printing hundreds of billions more of them. The logical extension? Making more and more of less and less until we have an infinite amount of nothing.

Collaboration

1. Inclusion for the sake of appearing inclusive, regardless of merit, qualifications or credentials;
2. Reducing the product to the level of team consensus, instead of enriching it to that of the most expert member.

Conservative Women
Either don’t exist, or simply must be ill-educated, barefoot and pregnant mouthpieces for their male slave-masters.

Conservative Racial Minority Man

  • Impossible!
  • Brainwashed “Uncle Tom”
  • That doesn’t have to count toward my ideals of “diversity”, does it?

    Conservative Racial Minority Woman

    (Appearing on forehead of liberal in electronic lettering…)
    !DIV/0 ERROR
    UNABLE TO PROCESS FUNCTION
    (…followed by protracted period of open-mouthed, glassy-eyed, nonverbal silence.)

    Social justice
    Classifying entire groups of people as helpless victims of grievous oppression in order to garner sympathy and preferential treatment for them, thereby perpetuating social injustice.

    Affirmative action
    1. Overreaction to collective, self-manufactured guilt over the bad deeds of dead people by overcompensating for the injustices those corpses committed when alive, against other people who also are dead;
    2. Inequality in the name of equality, using discrimination today to “solve” discrimination of yesteryear (a.k.a., “Two wrongs do make a right.”).

    Reparations
    Overreaction to collective, self-manufactured guilt over the bad deeds of dead people by giving payola to the descendants of those corpses who suffered injustices when alive, at the hands of the aforementioned dead.

    Tolerance

    1. Not literal tolerance–but instead outright approval and celebration–of any among many moral depravities and fringe lifestyles that make an idol out of personal sexual pleasure;
    2. Alternatively but similarly, tolerance of every point of view except those arising from a socially conservative and Christian worldview.

    Diversity
    Bowing at the altar of anything and everything not related to or emanating from English-speaking Christian males of European ancestry, particularly rural ones.

    Equality
    Some are more equal than others.

    And so goes our post-1984 American Animal Farm.

  • Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: 10-second attention span, conservative, culture, euphemisms, fluency, humanism, ignorance, liberal, responsibility, sociopolitics

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