So I’m peacefully sleeping this morning because it’s Saturday and because it’s not even 5 am yet. We’ve been having this lovely heat wave and apparently there’s a warm front (or cold front depending on which way it’s moving) around here causing storms. We were put under a thunderstorm watch last night when I got home from work until 8pm. Well around 8 they decided to cancel that and issue another one and then we were under a watch until 2 am.
There was a nasty looking line of storms heading our way and I figured we would get hit around midnight or 2. Hey, if the weather guy can’t be precise, why the hell should I be? I’m not even getting paid for it. Anyway, I woke up around 2 and flipped on the weather channel and that line of storms broke up and weren’t even going to touch us. I went back to bed and tried to get some more sleep after seeing we were under a watch now until 8am on Saturday.
I go to sleep and I have my police scanner on listening to that apparently in my sleep because I was sleeping. I was dreaming and remember hearing someone say we were under a severe thunderstorm warning and all I could think about in the dream was that I had to get home. Apparently they said that on the scanner though because then I woke up slightly just enough to hear them say ‘do you want me to ring the sirens?’ Well my first thought was that they were going somewhere and wondered whether or not they should turn on their siren or not.
Before I could fall back asleep however I realized that they meant should they blow the storm sirens. Now I don’t call these storm sirens, they are and have been for the last 15 years I have lived here been TORNADO SIRENS. The only time they were set off was in the case of a tornado warning. I guess that policy has been changed. Before 5 am I’ve got sirens going off like crazy and I’m positioned in town where I don’t just hear one siren, I hear them all. My first thought is of course… fuck, there’s a tornado out there. So I flip on the TV and look at the Weather Channel again and realize that not only are there no tornadoes heading for me, the storm itself is nowhere near my fucking town either. Sure, the whole county was under the warning but the storm was way in the northeast part and heading southeast and we were… go figure… southwest of the storm. So basically my local officials woke up the entire fucking town because it was storming 70 miles away. Thank you, I feel much safer. The sirens shouldn’t be blown every time there is a storm because what it does is make us less alert when they ring, much like the boy who cried wolf.