We Need to Talk About Sirens

We need to change the way we think about outdoor sirens for storm warnings.

It's 2022. There's enough technology and digital tools available for individuals to receive weather warnings, whether or not they have a smart phone. If you live in Kansas, any radio or TV outlet will be ready to break into emergency programming to broadcast warnings. If you're on social media, those same outlets have accounts where you can find weather information in a pinch.

I'm not saying we should remove outdoor sirens or make them obsolete. They serve an important function as part of the severe weather warning system. I'm suggesting we change our thinking about them to be the last method of warning, not the first.

There's a lot of psychology involved in how people process warnings for dangerous weather conditions. After the Joplin, MO tornado in 2011, meteorologists and emergency management officials conducted a survey of survivors to determine what motivated them to seek shelter and how many stimuli it took for them to understand the situation was dangerous. The results found that people needed two to nine indicators, from darkening skies to sirens sounding and seeing other people taking shelter, before they did themselves. 

The same can probably be said of Kansans who may be too desensitized to weather warnings. Citing an article written by my cousin Stan Finger in 2017, roughly 60% of tornado warnings in Kansas at that time turned out to be false alarms. Warnings are issued from radar-indicated rotation in a thunderstorm, and when they don't pan out and a tornado doesn't materialize, people shrug it off as "the weatherman being wrong again." Naturally, that will lead to people becoming fatigued by sirens and weather warnings, but it's still the best technology we have available to us at the moment. We don't yet possess the tools or knowledge to identify why some storms produce a tornado and some don't, but science is getting closer to unraveling that ball of yarn, and I do believe we'll crack that mystery in my lifetime. 

Obviously, part of the formula for severe weather warnings includes visual confirmation. If a person sees a livestream of a tornado on TV impacting their town through a chaser's dashcam or a tower camera, then they'll be more motivated to take action (see Tuscaloosa, Ala. in 2011). To me, this helps prove the importance of storm chasers and spotters as part of the public warning system. 

It was also revealed through the Joplin survey that public education on tornadoes and severe weather is still lacking in some areas. There's still a lot of folklore that rules the public psyche on storms. Some of that is handed down generationally, like the idea that a tornado can't jump over mountains or cross rivers. In 1966, residents of Topeka thought Burnett's Mound would protect them from nasty storms. That was disproven when an F5 tornado swept over the mound on the southwest side of town and ultimately destroyed a large swath of the city, including the Washburn University campus and much of the downtown district.

One of the biggest mental hang-ups about bad weather comes from something called optimism bias, or the old "I never thought it'd happen to me" line of thinking. It most definitely can, and depending on where you live, it will at some point in time. 

I've heard from folks in the past who've said it seems hypocritical of me to talk about tornado safety and taking shelter when I'd rather be out chasing or observing the storm. That's because of my nature; I have to go and see things for myself to know and understand. The underlying thing, however, is always education. Severe weather fascinates me, so I've taken the time to study it (the learning never stops, really). That interest began in kindergarten when I picked up a book in my school library called "Year of the Storms," about Kansas tornadoes in 1990. Over the years, I've realized you can't force people to care about the weather, no matter how interesting it is. You just have to be clear when informing them of the risk. 

As a local example, during a severe weather event in Riley County in September, emergency management officials sounded sirens to warn of straight-line winds possibly exceeding 70 miles per hour. This confused a lot of residents, who were now worried about a tornado threat that didn't exist. Sirens can be sounded in a local area if there's other nasty weather, like excessive winds or flash flooding, which could impact people and property. On the day this happened there were a lot of folks out and about for the K-State football game. The public later made their displeasure and confusion about the sirens sounding known. County emergency officials have since admitted that they can do a better job of providing follow-up information about any weather threats which might result in the sirens being sounded.

Outdoor sirens are WWII-era tech that Americans have been trained over decades to associate with the threat of a tornado. They're actually just civil defense sirens, intended for things like air raids, repurposed for postwar life in the U.S. It's time to move on from relying on that as a sole indicator of a dangerous storm. It's also time for people to move beyond the dissonance of daily reality they observe versus what could potentially affect them. If you live in Kansas, it's only a matter of time before a storm impacts your life in some way. It's up to you to be prepared for it when it happens.

One of the best ways to be prepared is to learn more. The National Weather Service has a lot of safety information broken up by the type of phenomenon. It's definitely worth exploring.

P.S. NOAA weather radios start around $20, can be found online or at your local hardware store, and you can get them programmed for your area each spring.

:)