Jon Person
EF0
I think people are complacent, too, having sat in the bathtub several times with no consequence. How long has the terror alert been "Elevated" across the nation now? The problem with alerts is that they cover a very broad area.
It won't be long before the NWS will be able to warn for specific storm tracks, not just entire counties. One of my clients writes emergency response software for emergency dispatch centers. The software I was shown last week had a map on the computer of all houses and streets in a county. (Very similar to a satellite Google map.) He drew on the screen a freehand shape with his mouse and within two seconds had a list of all phone numbers from all the houses inside the area he had drawn, ready to dump into a "reverse 911" system. (R911 was used with some success during the San Diego fires as well.) If such a system were commonplace, a storm's track could be drawn in this way and very specific people could be notified with a recorded message. It will be a while before such a system is nationwide and working smoothly with all kinds of phone lines, but the days of county-level granularity for warnings are numbered IMO, and that gives me some hope and relief that complacent people will soon have a real reason to take a warning seriously.
Plus, think of the fun of prank-calling your chasing buddies with fake R911, or keeping a red phone by the tub.
It won't be long before the NWS will be able to warn for specific storm tracks, not just entire counties. One of my clients writes emergency response software for emergency dispatch centers. The software I was shown last week had a map on the computer of all houses and streets in a county. (Very similar to a satellite Google map.) He drew on the screen a freehand shape with his mouse and within two seconds had a list of all phone numbers from all the houses inside the area he had drawn, ready to dump into a "reverse 911" system. (R911 was used with some success during the San Diego fires as well.) If such a system were commonplace, a storm's track could be drawn in this way and very specific people could be notified with a recorded message. It will be a while before such a system is nationwide and working smoothly with all kinds of phone lines, but the days of county-level granularity for warnings are numbered IMO, and that gives me some hope and relief that complacent people will soon have a real reason to take a warning seriously.
Plus, think of the fun of prank-calling your chasing buddies with fake R911, or keeping a red phone by the tub.
