Waking up this morning, seeing The Weather Channel showing parts of Dayton, Ohio getting ripped by a tornado, reminded me of 45 years ago(1974) when I was the Chief Meteorologist at WDTN-TV2 in Dayton. I remember interrupting programing at 4:25 PM to broadcast a Tornado Warning from the local office of NWS. My TV station did not have live radar, just a still facsimile picture that was 5-10 minutes old. My competitor (late Gil Whitney WHIO-TV) did have a live radar and he broke into programming at 4:30 PM showing the well defined hook echo of major tornadoes. Xenia, Ohio was hit at 4:40 pm by a EF5 tornado killing 33 and injuring almost 1,200 people. If you saw the damage, you wondered why more didn't die? Warnings came out 15-20 minutes ahead of touchdown and people did have basements to seek shelter. I wonder if the death toll would be as great with today's technology? We didn't have cell phones, no weather apps to issue alerts with the only way to receive warnings from NWS being a painfully slow teletype machine. Thinking back, our communications were really very primitive. If you don't have the FOX Weather App, please download it. You can program it to follow your location so that if you go to Oklahoma City, or Dayton or wherever, you'll receive any severe weather warnings. What a great tool!
Our weather will see little change into next week. We do have a chance for increased shower activity for Thursday-Saturday, but even then chances will only be 20-30%. I remember my old colleague (Jeff Baskin) saying..."when in drought, leave it (rain chances) out". Most of the time Jeff was correct. Stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment