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| Victims pick through the destruction of a deadly tornado in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Photo via Twitter by Aaron Rigsby @AaronRigsbyOSC |
I don't seen any reports of additional deaths on Sunday from the severe weather. But I have to ask myself: Did that many people have to die in Friday's storms?
This was the worst kind of tornado you could get. It was exceptionally strong, so unless you were in a storm shelter or extreme fortified building, chances of survival weren't great.
The tornado raced forward at 70 mph through the Mississippi darkness. Before people knew it, it was upon them, despite warnings from the National Weather Service and highly dedicated, professional television meteorologists.
People have a habit of relying on visual cues when endangered by a tornado. At night you don't have those cues.
With all those factors, it was almost inevitable there would be deaths and injuries. Even so, I'm convinced the toll of deaths and injuries cold have been lower.
I've seen a lot of accurate commentary that the tornado hit an area with a lot of mobile homes, substandard housing and relative poverty. Fear of a tornado tragedy like the one that hit towns like Rolling Fork have been a concern for years.
True, some safe rooms and shelters opened to the public in some parts of Mississippi before Friday's storms. But I don't think there were enough community storm shelters for people in those mobile homes, or an effective system to coax residents out of their unsafe homes and into shelters in the hours before tornadoes touched down.
Part of that is all the false alarms you get. Sometimes, a tornado watch is issued, but the tornadoes that do form don't seem particularly destructive. Or they are devastating, like on Friday night. But these storms cover narrow paths.
Thousands of people were at home just a few miles from the tornado path, blissfully unaware of the horrors nearby.
Typically a tornado warning is issued anytime between a few minutes and a little less than a half hour before a twister strikes a particular location. That doesn't give much time to flee and drive to a shelter. It's really dangerous to be caught in a car during a tornado.
But forecasts continue to get better ahead of severe weather and tornadoes, with more lead time. Meteorologists are more and more frequently alerting specific target zones an hour or two ahead of time when they suspect a particularly dangerous situation will develop.
Friday night, about an hour and a half before the tornadoes starting raining death and destruction on Mississippi, NOAA's Storm Prediction Center released a statement. It said that thunderstorms that were about to cross the Mississippi River from Louisiana were entering an atmospheric environment that would encourage strengthening storms and tornadoes in Mississippi.
The statement said those atmospheric conditions seemed primed to create strong to intense tornadoes
This NOAA statement was released to the public, as all such short-term storm forecasts are, but there were few systems in place to act on it. In a perfect world, that statement would have been the cue to quickly get people out of mobile homes in the northern half of Mississippi and into safer shelters for the night.
NOAA released similar statements in the hour or two before a horrific tornado struck Mayfield, Kentucky in December, 2010. Tornadoes that night killed 89 people, most of them in and near Mayfield.
After that tornado, there were complaints that people were not allowed to leave work places or other sites to seek safe shelter in the time between the NOAA statement warning of impending danger and the time the tornado struck. Similar complaints were made after a tornado warning came to fruition in Illinois that night, killing six people at an Amazon warehouse.
It would take coordination and a little money to form a chain when these warnings are issued. You'd need shelters ready to open, then someone to help quickly flush people out of unsafe housing and into shelters in time for the tornado's arrival.
A system like this would be especially helpful in the South, from Arkansas and Louisiana to Georgia. It's a region especially prone to strong, night time tornadoes, with large areas of poverty and substandard housing that's especially dangerous in such storms.
As forecasting continues to improve in severe weather events, it's time to take that increased meteorological precision and put it to work for some of American's most vulnerable people.
A new outbreak of severe weather seems likely late this week in the South and Midwest. If the Storm Prediction Center puts out more dire statements an hour or two before a powerful tornado, and people take heed, that will be a win. Hopefully the first of many wins.
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