Instapundit has a good post up this morning about weather radios. A couple excerpts:
SO IN THE WAKE OF THE KANSAS TORNADO TRAGEDY, I finally got around to unboxing and setting up the all hazards weather alert radio
that I ordered a while back.…
More importantly, it will go off if
there’s a tornado warning in my area. It lets you set the alerts you
want to hear about or ignore (though a few, like “tornado warning” are
non-defeatable — who wouldn’t want to know about that?) and it
lets you set it to register only for your own county or other limited
areas. It was pretty cheap — about 50 bucks — setup was easy, and
there’s a battery backup in case the power goes out. Not a bad little
gadget.
The good thing is that the disaster sparred him to finally get it out and set it up. The bad thing is that he didn’t have it setup before something bad happened. (Bad Glenn!) If the tornado had been around Knoxville he might not have had the chance.
For me it does bring up the sirens vs. radios debate again. It was a good thing that the sirens in Greensburg were sounded well in advance of the storm, but what if they hadn’t? What if power had been knocked out by the storm or by some other freak accident and the sirens could not have been used? Are you willing to put your life and the lives of your family in the hands of the local government? NOAA Weather Radio is an ideal solution in that it is not centralized to one area. You don’t have to rely on sirens to know that something is coming. It’s all about personal responsibility versus abdicated responsibility.
Of course, all this is coming from a weather nut too.
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