March 2 - 6 is severe weather preparedness week in Illinois, just ahead of storm season for the state. March 20, the first day of Spring, marks one of the busiest seasons for weather and safety organizations.
Cathy Beck is director of the McLean County Emergency Management Agency [EMA]. She understands storm season can cause panic.
"We see some storm anxiety through the public. Lots of it’s through a Facebook comment, ‘Oh no, not another storm,’ kind of thing,” Beck said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
“Being trained and getting more education about storms, how they work, how they develop and how they dissipate, is one of the best ways to relieve storm anxiety.”
In the digital age, Beck said technology is the first line of defense to receive notifications, education and resources about severe weather. Plus, people can tell their friends and family what they heard from weather radios, apps, radar or social media.
The worst thing someone can do, though, is just assume the weather will pass them by.
“It’s not a question of if we’re going to get weather, it’s a question of when we’re going to get weather,” she said. “It’s going to happen; we can’t stop it. We just need to prepare it and protect ourselves and our families and our properties as best we can.”
At the same time, technology has hindered some education efforts as well, and in collaboration with the changing nature of weather, misconceptions appear online.
“There are so many sources out there now and people can get information at their fingertips immediately from reliable sources as well as non-reliable sources,” said Beck. “So, knowing what’s actually coming or forecasted is a little bit more of a challenge, but also weather changes.”
Though in the face of imminent severe weather, new technology has given EMA the ability to handle events in and out of the office.
“When I started at EMA in 2017, when there was severe weather, we needed to come to our offices, where we have radio rooms and siren controllers and things like that,” Beck said.
“But as technology changes, we've been able to make it so where we can send information, receive information, talk to our spotters and sound the sirens remotely, so we don't have to necessarily be in our office anymore.”
Storm safety and precautions
In a particularly bad storm, the agency is undertaking multiple efforts to increase safety and knowledge of the system to the county.
“First thing that happens with the weather is, every morning we receive a briefing from National Weather Service [NWS], so we look at that. …If something severe is incoming, there are usually webinars with [NWS] throughout the day that we attend and share information with our partners,” she said.
Beck said the agency shares information on Facebook and Nixle, a subscription-based weather app, as quickly as possible. Beck said EMA will launch its own mass notification system to notify residents of severe weather by email, landlines and cell phones “very soon.”
The agency will also open a digital room in Veoci, that sends notifications to the lead and secondary weather officials across the county’s 27 areas. They’re also called spotters, volunteers who observe and report on weather for the agency and NWS along with EMA’s other staff.
“We’ve given them a radio and we work with the lead spotter over our radio, and then each of those has a team of two to 10 people, so we could easily have 200 people out spotting during a severe weather event,” said Beck.
Veoci allows the entire team to share information on what they are seeing.
“They’ll send pictures of damage, hail, wind, limbs down. They’re sending us video information, but they are also communicating that verbally and through the…platform, so everybody’s aware of what’s going on,” she said.
It is important for spotters to keep a safe distance from a storm. The rural areas let spotters see over fields instead of having to be in the line of danger. In more urban areas, spotters will have a dedicated watching area.
“During night, spotting can be really dangerous because it’s really hard to see unless you have lightning strikes that light up the sky and then you can see something coming,” she said. “We do encourage the spotters to be close enough to somewhere that they can seek shelter and be safe.”
Beck said if there are not enough volunteer spotters in Bloomington-Normal, first responders can step in. Rural municipalities might ask their fire departments.
Weather sirens are a common form of warning residents and it is one that does not require a phone or internet connection. They signal winds above 70 miles per hour, severe thunderstorms and dust storms, but are usually related to the touchdown of a tornado.
“Just be prepared and take shelter. Don’t rely on the tornado sirens to tell you, ‘Hey, something’s coming’. It can pop up,” she said. “Those are for outdoor warning, and they’re intended to warn people outdoors to take shelter. So likelihood of hearing them indoors, especially during a storm when wind, is going is minimal.”
Tornado season in Illinois is April to June, but Beck noted tornadoes have the possibility of touching down 12 months out of the year.
Central Illinois drought
As Lakes Bloomington and Evergreen are 10 feet below adequate levels, the drought in Bloomington, along with the rest of Central Illinois, persists. Therefore, Beck said fire risk has increased.
“There were enough fires that last fall we had a fire ban out working with fire departments, but in the last couple of weeks have been there have been a significant number of field fires and things, and those risk homes. They travel,” said Beck. “They travel so fast, and the wind can pick up embers and start another fire somewhere else, because everything is so dry.”
“Some days, we’ll hear three fires on the radio. Some days, we might miss a day when there’s a fire, but there have been multiple field fires.”
Beck said EMA doesn’t respond to fires unless the fire departments ask for extra help.
Beck said the recent rain has helped, but NWS told her it would take another foot of rain to reverse the drought in Central Illinois.
“If we don’t get enough rain to be able to reverse some of the drought situation that we’re in, I do anticipate having more burn bans this spring, but that’s not my call. That’s the fire department's call.”
Beck said temperatures heading into spring will be slightly above normal, but she said, again, the weather can circumvent predictions.
