Nothing
Up My Sleeve
Jon
Gallagher
Weather
or Not…. (part 1)
My
computer beeped at me tonight.
That’s
not an unusual occurrence, especially when I’ve got the spell checker on. I type about 70 words a minute with
about 67 mistakes a minute, so often, the spellchecker sounds more like the
telegraph operator on the Titanic sending out a Morse Code message than it does
anything else.
But
I digress.
My
computer beeped at me to let me know about a “Significant Weather Alert” that
had been assigned to our area.
Huh?
It’s
a good thing there wasn’t a tornado headed toward my house because I’d have
still been sitting here, trying to figure out what the heck a “Significant
Weather Alert” was.
I’m
not sure what happened to Severe Thunderstorm watches or warnings. I’m not sure if there are still Tornado
watches or warnings. I may be
sitting here some night as Elmira Gulch peddles by my window with Toto in her
bicycle basket, while I’m trying to figure out just how significant the weather
is going to get.
Galesburg
has an excellent warning system in place.
When severe weather approaches, the TV stations out of the Quad Cities
interrupt their broadcasts to warn viewers, not only in the Quad Cities, but in
all the outlying areas such as Galesburg as well. The radio stations in Galesburg also suspend their
broadcasts to bring breaking weather developments.
Peoria
doesn’t do as well. The four TV
stations that serve our area are quick to put up little maps down in the corner
of the screen to show weather warnings, but they’re a little slow in getting on
the air with a live update. The
radio stations here are a joke.
One
night, I scanned the FM dial, looking for weather information. For the most part, I found music. When I flipped over to the AM side, I
found one AM station that I could get (WMBD), but they were too busy
broadcasting a Cardinals’ game to be bothered with alerting area residents that
they were about to be blown away.
Instead of broadcasting a warning, they were inserting an annoying beep into
the game about every ten seconds.
The
beep allowed us to know that something was going on. Gee, thanks! Any
flippin’ fool could look out the window and tell something wasn’t right. We really didn’t need a beep to confirm
our suspicions. We needed
guidance.
I
live in Elmwood. For those of you
who aren’t up to date on Illinois Geography 101, Elmwood is a small town,
slightly smaller than Knoxville, located just a couple miles east of the
bustling metropolis of Yates City which is located on the southeastern part of
Knox County. If you’re still
having trouble imagining where this is, it’s halfway between Galesburg and
Peoria. If you still can’t come up
with an approximate location, I can’t help you.
As
far as weather goes, this is sort of a “no-man’s land,” just outside the
Galesburg area and not quite in the Peoria area. This means that even though we’re a modern little town,
complete with all the modern technological amenities like a tornado siren,
we’re pretty well forgotten when it comes to weather warnings.
A
few summers ago, my middle daughter had her boyfriend over for the evening and
the weather was starting to turn nasty.
Severe storm watches and warnings were being posted all over the area,
and our electricity was trying to decide if it was going to stay on or
not. We sat in the front room,
listening to the rain pelting off the windows and the branches of the trees
swishing violently back and forth.
The
lights went off. The rain started
hitting harder and we realized it wasn’t rain, but hail. I began to wonder if it might be a good
idea to head for the basement.
The
tornado siren started wailing and made my decision for me. We were going below.
This
is not a simple thing at our house.
We don’t have inside access to the basement. We have to go out the back door, around a corner and down a
set of cement steps in order to get to the basement. Doing this in pitch blackness as hail pounded off our skulls
while trying to maintain our footing on very slippery cement steps was
challenging, especially when trying to do it with some speed.
We
huddled in the dark basement, trying to get some news or information from the
battery operated radio I’d grabbed on the way, but all we could get was the
aforementioned music and ballgame.
Before long, the hail stopped, the sirens stopped, and I poked my head
out of the basement to find that the street lights were all slowly coming back
on. There were no feet sticking
out from under the house with ruby slippers on, so I figured we were safe.
The
boyfriend decided after about an hour that it was time to head home to
Abingdon. We wished him well and
sent him on his way. Fifteen
minutes later, he called back on his cell phone, wondering if we could put him
up for the night.
It
seems that he’d gotten just to the other side of Yates City and found police
blocking the road. An unconfirmed
tornado (it was never made official) had destroyed a shed and a few trees,
leaving the road blocked by debris.
Later,
I would find out that this “tornado” had hit about ten to fifteen minutes before our sirens went off. In other words, by the time our warning
system had kicked in, the threat was already past us.
I
asked one of the firemen about this since they serve also as trained spotters
for severe weather. I was told
that our sirens are actually controlled from Peoria and once a front or funnel
cloud are within range of Peoria, the sirens are activated.
Unfortunately
that means that the front or funnel cloud is already past Elmwood.
More
than ten years ago, I was filling in an on air shift on the old Q93 (WGBQ-FM)
when severe weather hit the area.
I’d never been formally trained as to what to do during a storm,
especially one was accompanied by a string of warnings that needed to read on
the air. The machine that served
basically as a teletype kept printing off watches and advisories, and I kept
reading them.
I
was a bit concerned because I kept reading a thing that told people to stay
away from metal objects and here I was, standing around a whole bunch of metal
objects. Not only that, I was
speaking into one which was attached to a really big metal object that extended
a few hundred feet up in the air.
Each time I read this, I wondered how smart it was for me to be doing
this.
I
didn’t know how to handle the situation and I was by myself, so I decided to
handle it the same way I would want it handled if I was on the listening side
rather than the talking side.
I
spent most of the evening reassuring listeners that everything was okay and
that conditions were right for a storm, even though none had been spotted. I’d put on some music, run to the
teletype machine, rip off the latest weather bulletin, then rush back into the
studio to read it over the air. I
kept stressing that there was no reason to panic.
Midway
through one of the warnings, all hell broke loose. The weather radio that only went off if the National Weather
Service was issuing a tornado WARNING was going off. The teletype machine was spewing out paper at an alarming
rate. Every phone line in the
station was lit up (radio station phones don’t ring – they light up).
This
seemed like a pretty good time to panic.
According
to the warning that came across the wire, a tornado had been spotted west of
Galesburg and was moving our way.
I read the warning along with the list of precautions and actions people
should be taking.
Now
here was the problem. I was alone
in the station. It didn’t look
like anyone else was going to be coming in to help out. I had a warning in hand with the wire
service machine in the other room so I had no way of updating the information
without leaving the microphone. I
didn’t want to put music back on at such a critical time, nor did I want dead
air for the minute it would take to run out, grab a printout and run back.
I
threw a cassette tape into a recorder we had on the control panel. On the next trip through the warning, I
recorded what I was reading, then put that on the air. It gave me the time I needed to run out
to the teletype, grab more information, and return to the studio, all without
having to leave the air.
Somehow,
everyone survived. The tornado never
made it to Galesburg and I got through one of the most stressful evenings of my
life without any ill effects. In
fact, the station got several phone calls complementing me on the job I’d done,
including one from the employees of a fast food place on North Henderson Street
who had taken refuge in the restaurant’s walk in freezer.
Ray
Smith who used to work at WAAG had once told me that when severe weather hit
Galesburg, he headed for the station.
It was his duty to be on the air, issue warnings, and be a calming
influence to his listeners. That
always impressed me. I think I
drew a lot of my decisions that night based on what Ray had told me.
Now,
out in the middle of nowhere, knowing that we’re only going to be warned of approaching tornadoes after the fact,
I’ve invested in a weather radio and I keep an internet radar page bookmarked
on my computer.
I
need to know just how significant the weather’s going to be. I also need to know if I need to grab
my camcorder and head outside.