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Weather radios coming to Turtle Creek area |
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Monday, 02 March 2009 |
The next fire district to benefit from Saline Co-unty’s weather radio program is Turtle Creek.
Representatives from the county’s Office of Emerg-ency Management will hand them out on Tuesday, March 31, and Thursday, April 2.
They also will return to Haskell, but that date has not been announced. The supply of radios ran out when OEM handed them out earlier this month.
One fire district at a time, Saline County government is working to get weather radios in every home.They are free and are given to a new fire district as money becomes available, County Judge Lanny Fite said.
The county is not doing away with sirens, Fite said, But obtaining weather radios can cover broader ground than repairing an old siren, which can cost $15,000. For the same amount, each household can have its own emergency warning device.
“We can’t put enough sirens out in the rural areas for everyone to hear,” he said.
The radios run on electricity but also can run on batteries. For those living on the county line, the radio could be programmed to cover Saline and Garland counties.
Many of the sirens in rural parts of the county date back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fite said.
“Less than 60 percent of the county is covered by sirens,” he said. “Our goal is that everybody in the county has a weather radio.”
They are paid for through a $5 voluntary tax that property owners may pay on a yearly basis. A $7,000 grant obtained from rural services also is help funding the program. Through the tax, alone, the county received $48,446.93.Fire districts that have received radios, in addition to Crows, are Paron, Londsdale Traskwood, Sardis, Haskell, East End, Shaw and Lake Norrell.
The radios are programmed by the Saline County Office of Emergency Management and handed out by OEM employees.
In all, OEM has given nearly 3,850 radios.
John Robinson with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said weather radios are important to have because “six out of the seven” tornado fatalities in Arkansas before February 2008 had occurred while people were sleeping.
“In 2008, we talked to people in all the areas where fatalities occurred,” he said. “From these interviews, we understand that a number of the year’s fatalities occurred because people did not get the word in time. Indeed, we were told that several people were on the phone at the time the tornadoes struck.”
At the National Weather Service office in North Little Rock, the process of getting the warnings on the radio is a quick, automated process, he said. A warning text is immediately turned into audio and broadcast on NOAA radios when a warning is issued.
The NOAA weather radio transmitter that serves Saline County is located atop Chenal Mountain in western Pulaski County, Robinson said. The transmitters have a backup generator in case commercial power is lost.
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