Looks like Brad Ellsworth (IN-08) is pushing on the national level a bill of which I was critical on the state level.
A bill to require all new manufactured homes to come equipped with emergency weather radios is gaining traction in Congress, pushed by a campaign promise to an Indiana woman whose 2-year-old son was killed by a tornado in 2005.
My main critique was that this level of involvement by the government was a bit too great given what I perceived to be the effectiveness of weather radios and the relative ease of getting them on one’s own. Who knows, maybe my perception is wrong on both counts.
Doug, I think that you’re right on this, and Ellsworth is wrong- by a mile!
Concur – this is not a legitimate function of government, in my view.
Following Ellsworths’ logic, we should mandate equipping all new mobile homes with signs in every room that say “Warning: If a twister hits your mobile home you will probably die.” Or maybe “Turn on your radio stupid, it’s cloudy outside”.
Stop regulating just for the sake of regulating.
sheesh
Maybe they should work on getting better coverage. I’m midway between Louisville and Evansville and in good weather I can almost make out the broadcast from two stations, with mostly static, but only if the radio is on the bedroom floor. Otherwise, no signal at all in the rest of the house. I feel like I wasted forty bucks buying the thing.
I can understand why Ellsworth is doing this, given what district he represents. I don’t happen to think that mandating the weather radios will do much good. I think that we should remember that timely tornado WATCHES were not issued on that night in November 2005, meaning that people in the Evansville area could not have taken action before going to bed. There was also a problem with the NWS signal such that weather radios didn’t pick up the the tornado WARNING once it was issued. For those who want to blame the victims, I doubt that any of us would have made different choices that night, given the information that was available.
As to government involvement… is there a requirement that new *non* manufactured homes (built?) have to meet a certain standard of structural integrity in case of high winds?.
I guess I don’t have a huge problem with this. Seems to me somewhat like requiring seat belts in cars (note I didn’t say requiring people to use them…), or closer building safety codes like Brenda hints about. Manufactured/mobile homes are not good places to be during a tornado. And in the case of a middle-of-the-night storm like the Evansville one of 2005, interrupting radio/TV with weather alerts does zero good. Trust me, an operating weather radio WILL wake you up in the middle of the night if there’s an alert…my only problem has been setting it up so that it doesn’t go off for warnings in counties far away from mine.
That’s where I was going with my comment… is it a situation of “if you cannot meet requirement ABC, you must provide XYZ?” in which case I don’t see a lot of different in the level of governmental involvement.