Listening to the All-Hazard Station
I grew up in the Carolinas and afternoon thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches were just a part of warm weather. I kinda like a good rousing thunderstorm, though there can definitely be too much of a good thing. Maybe since my childhood never really suffered from weather — unlike an occasional colleague whose house was blown down around his ears (leaving him, his wife, and their son huddled in the bathtub) by a tornado in Little Rock, or my wife’s grandparents who had a TV burned up and scorch marks added to their family room decor by a lightning strike.
It does seem this area gets more of the tornadic weather than Camden did, and it finally registered on me that this seems to come at night. I should have noticed that after one passed close enough to hear back in November, but I was otherwise distracted, what with a high-risk pregnancy in the house and all.
The multiple storms this week finally moved me to buy a weather radio at Radio Shack (Wal-Mart’s response was “A what? Um … I think we used to have those over there [gesturing vaguely] …”). I foreswore the really neat features and bought a $20 model, about the size of a ham sandwich. It’s a digital alarm clock that has seven channels for NOAA weather frequencies — it doesn’t scan, you have to find the one closest to you and set it as your preferred channel — and both line AC and battery power.
So far I’m pretty satisfied. When the National Weather Service posts an alert — a severe thunderstorm warning or a tornado warning, this time of year — it emits a warbling alarm that continued until someone responds. When you hit the snooze button (also labeled “Weather”), it activates the NOAA radio and, if you’re timely, gives you the alert. If you’re slow to respond, you get the regular cycle of updates, but the alert messages seem to repeat every five minutes or so. At worst, you know to check the radar on WRAL and see what’s possibly bearing down on you.
The NOAA station is automated and much of the message is mechanical (alternating Male and Female voices). You can get the standard regional and local forcasts for about a sixty-mile radius by pressing the weather/snooze button at any time. Every so often the Female Voice announces, with flaky mechanical inflection, ”This is NOAA Weather Radio. All-Hazard Station. WNG. 7-0-6. Operating at 1-6-2-point-4-5 Mega. Hertz. For the. Eastern Piedmont. And. Central Coastal Plain.”
The downside is that you hear other people’s bad news, too, from an hour away. A lot of weather seems to generate or dissipate along the I-95 corridor, which is where we live and the high water mark (literally, in the case of Hurricane Floyd) for the Coastal Plain. This week thunderstorms have spun up the power across the road and headed east, nearly all of them, so we get little disturbances like a 1:00 a.m. alarm for a thunderstorm in Craven County. Oh, well. It can be disabled if you’re pretty sure there’s no weather coming this way. It only has to save your life one time to make all the irritations insignificant.