With the central Texas flooding tragedy fresh on their minds, US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) reintroduced the NOAA Weather Radio Modernization Act.
The purpose of the legislation is to make emergency communication during severe weather more reliable by modernizing weather radio equipment. It expands coverage for areas with poor or no cellular service, amplifies non-weather emergency messages, and provides additional transmitters for areas with weak or nonexistent cell service and broadband coverage.
Weather radios can sound an alarm for weather warnings, if they are equipped for it.
Texas-based Meteorologist, Troy Kimmel, works with emergency managers and gave some ways to receive critical weather information.
“Whether that involves going to a weather service (National Weather Service) website, whether that involves having your WEA (Wireless Emergency Alerts) turned on your iPhone or your mobile phone device, whether that involves having a NOAA weather radio, it's all hazard radio and is relatively inexpensive,” Kimmel states. “They're a one-time purchase only, and the broadcast signal covers a good part of the United States.”
He emphasized that people must have a plan that's been practiced for severe weather and that hope is not a plan.
"The plan has to be theirs. There's no one coming to your door. An emergency manager is not coming to your door. Someone from the National Weather Service is probably not going to come to your door. The sheriff's department, the police department, the fire department, EMS, they're not going to come to your door and tell you what to do,” says Kimmel.
He stresses that these are things people have to have planned out with their family.
“What happens at 1:35 in the morning if your house catches on fire? Do you have a plan if you've got three or four people in that house or five people in that house, your family? When it gets down to it, that's what we're going to find out on a local basis in Kerrville, that was some of the problem. We just didn't have really good plan in some cases," Kimmel says.
