Southern Storms

Air traffic in Birmingham will be backed up. Watch this live feed of a super cell near Birmingham.
CHECK IT
weather.myfoxal.com/myfoxal/indexdliveradar.html

I’m sorry this has nothing to do with aviation I shouldn’t have posted this.

I live in Nashville, and today just about all schools public and private got out early today for tornado warnings and the storm isnt really even here yet.

I think all the storms have passed by Nashville.

Aviation is ALWAYS related to weather, so no worries…

Wow! Lots of purdy reds and oranges in those echoes. VFR flight NOT recommended! Come to think of it, IFR flight not recommended either!

nope, http://lnk.nu/weather.com/dt4
May the students in Enterprise Alabama, whose school collapsed on top of them make it out safely. My prayers go out to the whole city of Enterprise.

edit: URL by mduell

Ipod could you edit your URL and make it smaller if not its chill. I agree with you I hope everyone is ok and safe after all is said and done.

I am very vocal about pushing that all schools require a basic Skywarn class before kids graduate. It makes me so mad that people get hurt or killed in severe weather as many times it’s preventable. There is a basic lifesaving technique of not sleeping in a mobile home during a tornado watch. FIND somewhere to go. Consider the alternative before it’s too late. Purchase an NOAA radio. Schools have a school nurse, why not have at least one person in management trained to monitor a radar during a watch? Why would this be difficult given many children are collected into one building? Granted, radar monitoring cannot predict a tornado but when the hook echo is riding down your driveway, especially during a PREDICTED and NATIONALLY ANNOUNCED expected outbreak, make sure the kids are safe. And perhaps in the case of Alabama, make sure the building is a viable shelter, or evacuate for the day when the watch of this magnitude is first issued. I know some did do that. They had a PDS watch and this system travelled all the way from my house in the midwest. My tornado sirens went off 40 full minutes before the storm arrived. A PDS is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. Not a cross your fingers and hope it misses us situation.

I’m not coming down off my soapbox.

TheButterflyLands I agree with you 100% but schools would rather spend money on things that they don’t need that makes there school look good rather then safe and a good place to learn. I love severe weather and I am looking for 2 good weather radio thats not to expensive but I don’t know if it’s worth doing because I live in Vermont and we don’t get tornadoes up here (although last year we were under a tornado warning it was just straight line winds) But I do watch the weather channel all day when were under a Severe Thunderstorm Watch. But I do think that schools need to be more cautious when there under the gun days before the storm system is even there.

Hi highly recommend the WR103NX NOAA radio made by Oregon Scientific. It’s portable and travels with me from March to July everywhere I go. It uses 3 AA batteries and you control what it broadcasts. It has at least 7 or 8 channels you can switch to pick up a better signal of the NOAA broadcasts. It works in silence mode as well where you get the alerts without the continuous broadcast. It holds 6 S.A.M.E. codes which you can program into it for any county or city you want to hear warnings for no matter where you are. If the batteries die, you have to program those codes back into it but I still love the control you have with it. If you change the batteries quickly, it will retain the codes.

You can get the S.A.M.E. codes from here
nws.noaa.gov/nwr/indexnw.htm

And you can get the radio here, among several other websites.
weatherconnection.com/sf_sub … et=08_wcos

I also have and love the more expensive Radio Shack handheld scanner which gives me NOAA weather, weather alerts, marine, air, police/fire department, and ham frequencies which includes the Skywarn frequency. It looks like a walkie talkie but has about 100 buttons. This one can take you over $100 where as the first one I mentioned is only thirty-something.

Fri Mar 2, 5:10 PM ET

ENTERPRISE, Ala. - Administrators at a high school where eight students died in a tornado were warned about severe weather nearly three hours before the twister struck, raising questions Friday about whether classes should have been dismissed earlier.

Residents of the neighborhood surrounding Enterprise High School said they heard warning sirens long before the tornado slammed into the building, crushing the victims in an avalanche of concrete and metal.

“It came real fast, but they had plenty of time to get those kids out because sirens were going off all morning,” said Pearl Green, whose 15-year-old niece attends the school and was hit in the head by a flying brick.

But school officials said they had no chance to evacuate earlier because of the approaching severe weather. And others said the carnage would have been greater if students had been outside or on the road when the storm hit.

Gov. Bob Riley defended administrators’ actions after a tour of the school.

“I don’t know of anything they didn’t do,” Riley said after stepping out of the collapsed hallway where the students died. “If I had been there, I hope I would have done as well as they did.”

The last of the bodies were removed Friday.

“Each one who was brought out, somebody would say, `That was a good kid,'” said Bob Phares, assistant superintendent.

The students were among 20 people killed Thursday in Alabama, Georgia and Missouri by tornadoes contained in a line of thunderstorms that stretched from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast. The storms damaged or destroyed hundreds of homes, toppled trees and knocked down power lines. In Enterprise, a town of 22,000 people, more than 50 people were hurt.

President Bush planned to visit two of the storm-damaged areas Saturday. The destinations were still being worked out Friday with governors in the affected states.

Warning sirens began blaring in Enterprise about 10:30 a.m. Thursday, prompting school officials to order the high school’s 1,200 students into interior halls supposedly the safest part of the building.

Many students left school after the initial warnings, and administrators decided to dismiss classes at 1 p.m., before the worst of the weather was forecast to hit, Phares said.

But with hundreds of students still huddled inside the school, emergency management officials warned that a possible twister was on the way and advised school officials to hold students until 1:30 p.m., Phares said.

“The storm hit about 1:15,” he said. A wall in one hall collapsed, and the concrete slab roof fell on the victims.

Brittany Ammons, 18, left school about 10 minutes before the tornado struck. She said students in the halls could hear the sirens, but no one panicked.

“We weren’t really worried because we’re always hearing sirens for bad weather,” Ammons said.

Looking at the remains of their school, Ammons and three classmates wondered whether students should have been sent home after the first warnings were issued. But senior Charles Strickland said the carnage would have been far worse if students were trying to leave school during the storm.

“If they’d let us out, they’d be looking at 50 to 300 dead,” Strickland said. He pointed to a parking lot full of students’ vehicles that were thrown around by the twister, with some coming to rest against the building.

“Imagine those kids in the parking lot sitting in those cars,” English teacher Beverly Thompson said.

Mitch Edwards, spokesman for the Alabama Board of Education, said the state has a plan requiring schools to conduct weather drills and review safety plans. But the decision on whether to close schools is left to superintendents and principals.

“It’s a situation where local superintendents and principals are in position to make the best call,” Edwards said. “They try to react based on the best information available.”


Associated Press writer Stephen Majors contributed to this story.

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If anyone can’t get a NOAA/SAME radio, try a scanner. Any weather bulletins put out by NOAA are immediately rebroadcast by police/fire/EMS departments so that their personnel are alerted.

And if you don’t want either, and you have pc access, you can monitor ALL warnings on a national basis all at once. It refreshes every 2 minutes and I’ve compared it with my radio and my scanner and it seems this website is just about real time!!!

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