Weather Watches and Warnings

The other day when driving home, I heard that the weather service had issued a flood watch in anticipation of rain we would be receiving that evening. OK. I looked everywhere and couldn’t find signs of a flood anywhere. I guess I’m supposed to go upstream from some body of water and note when it starts to rise. I drove home, ate supper, watched television and went to bed. Heck, I live on a hill.

If somebody lives in a flood prone area they might ought to stay up and watch for rising water. If they live in a flood prone area and know about it, then I think they’re stupid. Stupid is hard to fix.

It seems like we are always getting a weather watch issued. I guess it makes the guys and gals at the weather service feel important or something, but it is absolutely useless information. Let’s see, there’s the winter weather watch which is always issued in the winter. Then there’s the flood watch, the thunderstorm watch, the tornado watch, the hurricane watch, and I guess several others that the weather folks issue. I’ve always said a weather watch means there’s a cloud somewhere in a hundred mile radius of my house…..maybe.

After watches, we get warnings...flood warnings, thunderstorm warnings….wait a minute...I’m not going to flood. Just what do they think I’m going to do about a thunderstorm warning? I don’t play golf and I’ve got enough sense to get off the water during a thunderstorm. I’m not going to stand outside holding metal rods in the air or try to fly a kite with metal wire. So what the heck am I supposed to do?

Thunderstorms bring lightning, rain and thunder. On occasions, but about as rarely as snowfall in the area, we get some hail. About every ten or fifteen years we get a hell of a hail storm. Most likely I’m either going to be at home or at work when a thunderstorm happens. I can’t do a darn thing about it. So why warn me? I’ve never been hurt by a thunderstorm and no family members or friends of mine have been hurt by a thunderstorm, so what’s the big deal?

Bottom line, it makes the weather forecasters feel important. They interrupt programs and talk about fictional rotation and possible hail and all kinds of bad goblins out there. In reality, there might be some heavy rain, some lightning, and maybe some high winds. I don’t have any magic shield to protect my home from that, so why should I worry? Honestly, I don’t.

I’m always amused that, after a thunderstorm, some newscaster will stand outside in the dark and show us pictures of a tree that was blown down. There’s probably 400 million trees in Mississippi and they found ONE that was blown down and it’s on the news. Sorry, that’s NOT news.

BUT…..I think tornado warnings are rather significant. And yes, I know that most tornados evolve out of a thunderstorm, but not all thunderstorms spawn tornados. A tornado is a devastating freak of nature that can wreak all kinds of havoc. I’ve been through four of them. If there is anything I want to be warned about, it’s a tornado. We have a basement where we gather with the cat when we hear the sirens going off. I appreciate our weather sirens. I think ours only sound when there is an actual tornado warning. No fictional, “I think I see a rotation”, no interruption of television programming, just a simple siren that means I ought to take cover. And I do.

Now why can’t everything else be that simple and that useful?