{"id":13223,"date":"2011-02-28T13:25:03","date_gmt":"2011-02-28T17:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foodembrace.com\/?p=13223"},"modified":"2011-02-28T13:25:03","modified_gmt":"2011-02-28T17:25:03","slug":"living-with-tornado-watches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/2011\/02\/living-with-tornado-watches\/","title":{"rendered":"Living with Tornado Watches"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Moving to Columbus or just Ohio in general means that you will be dealing with the high possibility of tornadoes.\u00a0 This was something that I was not aware of when I moved here.<\/p>\n

Ohio is considered the Midwest and the Midwest deals with tornadoes.\u00a0 However when you think about “The Midwest”, you think of places farther west like Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. Kansas and Oklahoma as well.\u00a0 Places where the storm chasers live and where the chance of seeing Auntie Em’s house flying away is probable.<\/p>\n

But Ohio is not immune to tornadoes and dealing with the crazy weather that brings them here.<\/p>\n

I didn’t know this.<\/p>\n

Oh I grew up with some serious thunderstorms and sometimes a watch would be issued but no one paid any attention to that because where we lived was not a tornado happy place.\u00a0 The chances of it happening were slim to none.<\/p>\n

Here the crazy storms and such didn’t phase me.\u00a0 I grew up only three hours east of here, how different can it be, was my mentality.<\/p>\n

In fact, we’ve lived in Ohio going on 6 years now and 5 of those years have been in a suburb of Columbus which is in Franklin County.\u00a0 Franklin County has a tornado siren system that goes off when a tornado watch or warning has been issued.\u00a0 There is also a weekly test of the system on Wednesdays at Noon.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn’t realize this until about, oh last year sometime.<\/p>\n

Yup.<\/p>\n

See, where I grew up, my town had a volunteer fire department.\u00a0 There were sirens located all around town that went off letting the volunteers know they needed to haul it to the department, get their gear on, and head out to a fire.\u00a0 There was also a weekly test every Saturday at noon.\u00a0 Those sirens and the sirens here sound exactly alike.<\/p>\n

Since I grew up with sirens going off all the time and knowing it wasn’t for me, that meant I didn’t have to pay attention to it.\u00a0 Eventually it becomes background noise and you reach a point where you don’t even notice them anymore.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to living here with sirens going off and guess what?\u00a0 I’m not paying attention to it because I thought it was for something else not related to me.\u00a0 It wasn’t until last year, during a particularly bad storm that the sirens were going off at a rapid rate.\u00a0 Enough that it was finally not background noise any longer but something I was fully aware of, at which point it dawned on me, “Oh wow! Maybe that’s a tornado warning or a warning about the storm.”\u00a0 Causing me to log online and see if we were under a watch of some kind.<\/p>\n

Now you may be thinking to yourself that I must be totally daft but when you grow up in an environment that doesn’t deal with a specific type of weather threat, then it really doesn’t enter your mind as a possibility.<\/p>\n

This is true no matter where one lives. For example, the South and snow aren’t really friends are they?\u00a0 The East doesn’t have to worry about earthquakes like the West.\u00a0 Coastal states deal with hurricanes and tropical storms while landlocked states do not.<\/p>\n

The concept of tornadoes are new to me.\u00a0 And when one isn’t from Ohio and you move here, you don’t get an instruction manual.\u00a0 There’s no pamphlet telling you what tornado sirens are and what you’re supposed to do when they go off.<\/p>\n

In fact, it took some major digging and summoning up serious Google-Fu to even find anything on the sirens and what course of action to take.\u00a0 The reason I started looking was because last night we got hit with a very serious thunderstorm.\u00a0 At 4:30am the sirens started going off and went off A LOT with the cycles very close to one another.\u00a0 I love thunderstorms but last night had me concerned.\u00a0 While Scott and Rocky slept, I searched the web to figure out what we were supposed to do.<\/p>\n

I didn’t find much but what I did find, I’ll share with you because maybe you’re new to Ohio as well.\u00a0 Maybe you’ve never had to deal with tornadoes before either.<\/p>\n

What to do when the Tornado Sirens Sound:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Link to Franklin County’s Emergency Warning System<\/a><\/p>\n

Link to the Warning System Fact Sheet<\/a> (PDF)<\/p>\n

The sirens sound when ever a tornado watch or warning has been issued.<\/p>\n

A WATCH<\/strong> means that the current conditions are good for a tornado to form.<\/p>\n

A WARNING<\/strong> means that a tornado has been spotted some where and to take shelter some place.<\/p>\n

To find out which your county is under, check your local news stations.\u00a0 For Columbus we have:<\/p>\n

10TV<\/a><\/p>\n

10TV also has a Facebook Page<\/a> for it’s weather department.<\/p>\n

NBC4i<\/a><\/p>\n

There is also AccuWeather <\/a>and for storm tracking with real time radar, there is Storm Pulse<\/a>.\u00a0 It is the best weather tracking site I’ve found.<\/p>\n

When the sirens go off, keep an eye on the weather outside your window and check the above sites to see if there is a watch or warning in your area.\u00a0 Stay alert and pay attention.\u00a0 You’ll know when to take to the basement to seek shelter because it will either be on the news OR the weather will be bad enough that you’ll start to get nervous.\u00a0 When that happens, listen to your instinct and just head to the basement or lowest part of your house.\u00a0 Have bottled water, snacks, and blankets handy in the event that you’re there for a while.<\/p>\n

The sirens will stop when the watch or warning has been lifted.\u00a0 Keep checking the weather to see when that happens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I hope that helps some of you who are like me, and are new to this situation. Stay safe and have those links bookmarked for easy access for when you need them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moving to Columbus or just Ohio in general means that you will be dealing with the high possibility of tornadoes.\u00a0 This was something that I was not aware of when I moved here. Ohio is considered the Midwest and the Midwest deals with tornadoes.\u00a0 However when you think about “The Midwest”, you think of places […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[62],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4KYWa-3rh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13223"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}