A lesson in tornadoes’ wake: Warnings work, but human response is key

As huge air masses began to collide last week over the central United States, Michael York, a veteran meteorologist, focused on the data swirling in front of him.

His face lit by screens at a cookie-cutter National Weather Service office in Paducah, Kentucky, Mr. York began sending out alerts midweek about the gathering of a powerful storm.

Finally, as the NWS radar caught the storm spinning off a twister on Friday, Mr. York’s office sent out a plain-spoken plea at 8:33 p.m. to take shelter: “Folks, this is as serious as it gets.”   

Thirty miles to the south, in Mayfield, Kentucky, machine shop owner Phil Crowfoot’s weather radio had been blaring since 6 o’clock. He knew the NWS predictions weren’t always perfect. “They’re good about missing snowstorms and stuff. I was hoping this was going to be one of them, too,” says Mr. Crowfoot. Yet he made plans to shelter.

“When it started going off all the time, I thought maybe this was real. It was hitting everything around us. ... I was saying a prayer when it was going by.”

The rare December tornado – the strongest of several in the region Friday – spun up in Arkansas, raged through the Land Between the Lakes and across the rolling hills of western Kentucky on a 220-mile path. When the tornado reached Mayfield around 9:30 p.m., it leveled much of the town. In all, the storms killed at least 87 people in four states, and injured scores of others. 

In its aftermath, questions are being raised about why a litany of warnings didn’t quell a still-building death toll. There are stark critiques of how companies like Amazon and a maker of votive candles handled safety concerns as the storms bore down. And, as President Joe Biden prepares to visit Kentucky Wednesday, the role of climate change is being discussed as a possible factor in the unusual weather conditions that contributed to the tornadoes’ severity. 

But the connection between Mr. York and Mr. Crowfoot on Friday highlights hope as well. Warnings were abundant, and they were widely heeded. Even as the fatalities put a focus on how to improve public safety, advances in pre-storm communication likely saved many lives on Friday, hazard researchers say.

Beyond improvements in atmospheric science and the rise of cellphone-based alerts in recent decades, the shift also includes language itself – as forecasters employ phrasing shorn of jargon and pretense to help people understand urgent threats and what they can do in response.

“Weather forecasting in general is moving very strongly towards not just making the forecast, but making sure that those forecasts are actionable – that people are understanding the context,” says Paul Roebber, co-author of “Minding the Weather: How Expert Forecasters Think.”

In at least some ways, the tornadoes that ripped through Kentucky will be a measuring stick for that effort.

The deadliest tornado in the U.S. happened in 1925, when at least 695 people died in the Tri-State Tornado, which also affected Kentucky along with other Midwestern states. 

Beyond technology: how to affect behavior

Advances in alerts since then, from cellphones to local news, have resulted in greater weather awareness among Americans. That is apparent even in news reports about how employers and workers argued about the need to protect themselves as the storms gathered. 

Potential preparation missteps are the reason researchers say debates about technology and climate change are insufficient to safeguard Americans. In fact, forecasters are focusing increasingly on understanding human behavior to counter growing vulnerabilities from population growth in regions of turbulent weather.

“Twenty years ago, we thought the public was pretty ignorant [about weather risks], and what we have learned in the last five years is that they know way more than we expect,” says Stephen Strader, a hazards geographer at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. “People know that they’re not in a safe location, but they don’t know what to do about it, and that’s always scary. Where do we go? It’s fight or flight, and 9 times out of 10 they’re going to choose fight.” 

Some 70% of tornado warnings are false alarms – long an acceptable threshold for forecasters who want to give people as much lead time as possible.

That tactic took a turn in 2011. On April 27 that year, a tornado outbreak caused 316 deaths, primarily in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. It was the costliest on record and deadliest since the 1925 Tri-State Tornado.

Partly due to concerns that residents didn’t take warnings seriously, average warning lead times have dropped from 15 to 11 minutes in the U.S. – a shift prompted by efforts to target warnings more accurately so that fewer false alarms go out.

“You could hear ... that he was scared”

Still, early and more general warnings also make a difference. On Friday, Sarah Stewart, regional director of operations for ClearView Health Care Management in Kentucky, discussed the coming storm at the staff Christmas party. She and her staff spent the rest of the day guiding preparations. One of the company’s seven facilities took a direct hit. There were close to 100 people, including 74 residents, in the building. Through steps such as moving people into hallways, and by what she calls a miracle, none were hurt.

What Ms. Stewart vividly remembers is the tone of the weather forecaster cutting through any question of false alarms.

“You could hear in his voice that he was scared, that he was nervous. He’s like, ‘If you are in Mayfield, you need to put a helmet on. You need to get wherever you can get and you need to pray.’ In the world that we live in right now ... when a weatherman is telling you to pray, he is concerned about your welfare.”

The sparsely populated West and Plains still see the bulk of the classic “Wizard of Oz” tornadoes – funnels dancing on the landscape. 

The Kentucky tornadoes are part of an eastward shift in the threat, in which violent, fast-moving tornadoes tear through suburban subdivisions, often under the cover of night, cloaked in rain.

Reaching people amid stresses of life

Social and economic marginalization also plays a role in preparations in places like Mayfield, a town of 10,000 where 1 in 3 residents lives below the poverty line.

That dynamic highlights the “physical and societal elements that come together when violent tornadoes upend complete towns and kill dozens,” says Professor Strader.

That was the challenge that Mr. York faced. It began with a message on Friday morning.

“No graphics with this post. Just straight from the office,” the Paducah NWS office posted at 10:19 a.m. on Friday. “This could be a significant severe event with a strong tornado or two across our region. Think about what you would do now. Better to err on the safe side.” 

In many ways, the natural cadences are an acknowledgement, disaster experts say, that meteorologists like Mr. York are learning unique skills on the job. The new federal infrastructure package includes funds to study the role of social science in saving lives during a natural disaster. 

Part of that evolution is that forecasters, too, are themselves often in the path of danger. 

After sending out the “tornado emergency” warnings, the Paducah office went dark as the storm knocked out power and a backup generator failed. The Springfield, Illinois, NWS office took over until power came back on

“Forecasters are human beings who are at risk and whose families are at risk as much as the people they are warning for,” says Dr. Roebber, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee meteorologist. “But they are professionals. ... They are not going to let their emotions get the better of them. They’re not going to panic. They’re going to try to figure out how to get this across to people to protect as many people as possible.” 

Looking back on last week, Mr. York says that perceptions about their role varies among his colleagues. 

“We all have different personalities, different ways of reacting, but for me it’s a very professional-type thing where I just focus more on the science and how [the weather] is going to impact people as far as potential damage or disruption to their lives,” says Mr. York. “I try to put that into nontechnical terms that they can understand.” 

Some forecasters, he says, take solace in the knowledge that their work saves lives. Mr. York’s approach includes a hard look at how his office performed. The lives lost, for him, are a reminder of a distance still to go.

“I’m critical. I want to be perfect,” he says. “The problem is, we’re dealing with the weather.”

Reporting for this article was done by Patrik Jonsson in Savannah, Georgia, and Noah Robertson in Alexandria, Virginia.