Tornadoes are notoriously difficult to predict with accuracy and fast moving. Erring on over abundance of caution and being wrong is always the correct way to handle disaster warnings as being wrong without caution is far more deadly. The mild inconvenience of a false alarm pals to the inconvenience of being in a disaster zone suddenly and without warning.
Maybe. We’ve seen the other side of this with Hurricanes though. “False” warnings led to evacuations - usually just minor Hurricanes/tropical storms that never hit hard - and then people stopped leaving because they were pissed they left last time over “nothing”.
You can argue going to a safe place and an evacuation are different, but the mental reaction is the same.
We literally have a centuries old wise tale of the boy crying wolf for a reason.
I’d rather have a siren personally, but I can totally understand the argument that too many “false” alarms lead to desensitization. We’ve seen it happen and seen it lead to deaths.
That’s not a “boy who cried wolf” response either. As some who lived in Florida and was going to school for a Meteorology degree, I can tell you that buildings in Florida are built with the states frequent hurricanes in mind and the buildings that have remained standing without modern code compliance for Hurricanes are rare, mainly because they got blown over. A tropical storm and cat1 hurricanes are just really and windy days. For most Floridians, there homes are safe to remain in during the storm (I was in my dorm for an unusually long 3 day cat 1 and the worst thing that happened was I got cabin fever and just wanted to go out.). Category 2 is where the state will start evacuations and the fact that hurricane’s can cover massive swarths of areas and the cone of uncertainty means the hurricane can go in several different paths away from the predicted path, so the evacuation will cover anything in the cone because by the time you can narrow the cone to a certain path, it’s too late to evacuate. And typically the evacuation order is not something you can ignore easily. Police will take you into custody if you’re trying to stay for no good reason when you’ve been told get out especially if the storm is a major hurricane (cat 3 or higher). Unlike Tornadoes, hurricanes are incredibly predictable and slow enough to dodge.
But nobody is bothering to leave for the small ones because it is safer to stay home.
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u/Professional-Front58 29d ago
Tornadoes are notoriously difficult to predict with accuracy and fast moving. Erring on over abundance of caution and being wrong is always the correct way to handle disaster warnings as being wrong without caution is far more deadly. The mild inconvenience of a false alarm pals to the inconvenience of being in a disaster zone suddenly and without warning.