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House Budget Committee approves money toward State Fair storm shelters

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With damage done by severe storms at two state fairs last year fresh in memory, the Missouri State Fair staff wants to build some safe places for its guests to take cover.

The Missouri State Fair (picture courtesy, the Missouri State Fair)

The House Budget Committee has approved a capital improvement package that includes over $86,000 from the Agriculture Protection Fund, toward building four storm shelters on the State Fairgrounds. The 1,500 square foot safe houses would hold up to about 200 people each and be rated to withstand winds up to 250 miles-per-hour.

State Fair Director Mark Wolfe says several events last year illustrated the need for these shelters. “Unfortunately it takes sometimes tragedies like what something that happened in Indiana at the state fair grounds to make people wake up and go, ‘What are we doing on our end?'”

Last year, strong winds caused the collapse of a concert stage at the Indiana State Fair. Seven people were killed and 43 were injured. Another storm during the Missouri State Fair blew down some tents and other temporary structures, but no injuries were reported.

Wolfe says in that incident, the Fair staff had plenty of advanced warning and evacuated campers into the Mathewson Exhibition Center, the National Guard facility and the assembly hall that are on the grounds. “The problem there would be that if we didn’t have that much notice, would we have had time to get those people out of that campground and across and over on to the main body (of the grounds) to do that.”

The plan is to build these four shelters in the campground area, but Wolfe stresses, they will not take the place of the current shower houses.

$86,000 would be the state’s match toward an application for a federal grant. The total project is expected to cost $345,000.

The appropriation bill passed by the House Budget Committee must be approved by another committee before it can be debated by the full chamber.

Weather Service to test new warnings in most of Missouri this year

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Residents in most of Missouri might notice something different about the severe weather warnings they hear this year. Whether they notice or not, the National Weather Service will be watching for results.

The Weather Service will issue updated warnings this year when seeing images on its radar like this April 15, 2011 tornado in Pike County. Image courtesy, National Weather Service.

The Weather Service offices that serve all of Missouri except the bootheel and Scotland and Clark Counties will be among the five testing new warning language beginning April 2. The changes have been developed following years of work by the Service and social scientists studying what people did in events including the Joplin tornado. The test is called the “Impact Based Warning Experimental Product.”

St. Louis Warning Coordination Meteorologist Jim Kramper says the goal is simple. “We’re just trying to get as much critical information in a very easy format so people can make quick decisions very easily.”

What’s new

One addition is a set of three new lines. “One line is going to simply say ‘Hazard,” and then we’ll put what is the storm producing, whether it be strong wind gusts, hail or potentially a tornado. The next line will be ‘Source.” Is this a radar indicated only event or do we have actual reports of it from spotters or somebody else? Then the next line will be the impact. What do we expect this storm to do? So for example if it’s hail, we’ll put we expect the hail to dent cars, damage roofs … or if it’s mainly a wind storm, we may say we expect trees and power lines to be down along with minor roof damage or structural damage; something like that.”

Another change will be an update to the Call to Action statements; the part of the warning where the Weather Service tells the public what to do. These have been updated by the social scientists. “They’ll simply say something like, ‘You need to move to shelter now.’ Very quick, short and sweet, this is what you need to do. Maybe not a lot of explanation, but that’s OK. This is not the time for explanation. It’s the time for very quick … this is what you need to do, otherwise you could be in big trouble.”

Kramper says the Weather Service will be looking for feedback. “From our partners in the media, to see what they think about it, how did they use it, what did they use, what parts of the new stuff in the warning did they feel is helpful, what parts would they like to see changed, what maybe could be added to make their job easier. Then also we’re going to try to get some feedback from the emergency managers. How did they use it, did it help them? There will places where the public can actually respond to the things that we’re doing as well.”

Visit this webpage to offer feedback to the new warnings this year.

Kramper says more changes could be coming, but the Service had to start somewhere. “We think the warning process and the result is going to be overhauled eventually in a bigger fashion, but we just can’t do it at once. We’re going to take steps and this is probably the first step.”

Why here, why now?

This map shows the areas covered by the five offices that will be testing the new warnings this year. Image courtesy, National Weather Service.

The five offices that will be testing the new warnings are St. Louis, Pleasant Hill (Kansas City), Springfield, Topeka and Wichita. Each has in the last year received an upgrade to its radar that will help the weather service in issuing the updated warnings.

Kramper says of the new dual-polarization radar, “In most cases it should help us differentiate between hail versus rain a little bit better. We should be able to get better train estimates from the radar so that should help in flash flood situations.”

If a tornado is occurring and throwing debris into the air, that should also show up. “If we see that debris and that lines up with everything else that we’re looking at … here’s a circulation, there’s a good signature, now we’ve got a debris signature as well, so far the research has shown, that’s like 90 to 95 percent sure there’s probably a tornado there.”

See our story on the Pleasant Hill Weather Service Office radar upgrade.

The upgrade to radar systems was not the reason the Service chose the five offices it did. Kramper says, “They wanted to try to get offices that had been effected by strong tornadoes recently and try to get a variety as well. Kansas sometimes looks at their storms a little bit differently than a lot of people in St. Louis did, so we’ll have a lot of variety in terms of the people that are going to be exposed to this new type of warning.

National Weather Service offers fewer chances to learn storm spotter training

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Reductions in funding have caused the National Weather Service to scale back the number of severe weather spotter classes it is offering. In northwest Missouri, the number of talks has been cut in half.

Spotter training classes help people know how to interpret storm features, such as this wall cloud. Images courtesy of the National Weather Service.

Andy Bailey is the Warning Coordination Meteorologist for NWS’s Pleasant Hill office. “Where as in the past we would do forty-five to fifty training sessions per season, this year we’re looking at about twenty-five.”

Bailey explains, the spotter schedule has been adjusted so the Service can get the most “bang for its buck.”

“For some of the rural areas, we’re working to do spotter training at one location per county every other year. In urban areas, where population is higher, we need to do it every year. We also do it every year in locations that are a little bit further away from our radar.” Bailey says that is because basic radar limitations mean the Service needs more eyes in those areas. “Places like around the Kirksville area, for instance, we’ll do spotter training there every year.”

Bailey hopes interested individuals will take advantage of any chance they have to take the training.

The classes teach attendees how storms form, why certain types of severe weather develops and where to look in a storm to see if certain phenomena are developing, such as a tornado.

Bailey says it can take a while to sink in. “After just one training course they’re probably still a little bit fuzzy but if they come back every year or two to get training and they go out spotting quite a bit, they really get to be very skilled at identifying that weather.”

See the schedule for spotter training classes offered in the Kansas City, St. Louis and Springfield Weather Service coverage areas.