I hope you all have been able to get out and enjoy the beautiful weather this weekend. I snapped this pic while outside yesterday.
With every severe weather outbreak comes new lessons learned on survival and protection of property. That’s the basis of this week’s Sunday Story. I hope you enjoy!
Lessons Learned
The 2019 severe weather season is already off to a rough start. On March 3rd, tornadoes hit Alabama and Georgia so hard that our nation lost more people to tornadoes in one day than in all of last year.
After each storm, National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologists go out and perform damage surveys. These surveys also allow them to talk with survivors and find out how they reacted to the storm. All of this information helps them to better educate us on what to do to minimize the injuries and fatalities from the next storm.
The NWS used to advise cracking your windows if a tornado were approaching. The idea was that this would help minimize the pressure difference between the inside of your home and the tornado. Storm surveys proved this ineffective and now we advise against this practice.
We’ve also learned that head injuries are some of the most common injuries suffered in a tornado. Therefore, we now advise having a helmet to wear as you take cover. This can help prevent a traumatic head injury from flying debris.
A new finding that I find intriguing is that of using porches as storm shelters. Time and time again we see mobile homes and trailers completely destroyed by tornadoes. NWS storm survey crews noticed that when a mobile home had a concrete porch the only thing left untouched by the tornado was that porch.
This got people to thinking and now several companies offer to build storm shelters within that concrete porch. Then, when a tornado is approaching the family can take shelter under the porch and possibly survive the tornado unscathed.
Spring is a beautiful time of year but we have to be mindful of the storms. Let’s just hope this season is a quiet one for us on the plateau!