Representative Hoy’s HB 1033 strikes me as a bit ridiculous. It requires that a mobile home that is installed in a mobile home community be equipped with a weather radio.
[tags]HB1033-2007[/tags]
Masson's Blog
Representative Hoy’s HB 1033 strikes me as a bit ridiculous. It requires that a mobile home that is installed in a mobile home community be equipped with a weather radio.
[tags]HB1033-2007[/tags]
I wrote a letter to the editor in the Columbus paper about this a few weeks ago. Bartholomew County has around 10 or so sirens for tornados, and can not afford to add more. One is placed out in the countryside where you have farms. One is placed where the most expensive and well-built homes are. One is placed by the Interstate where there are only businesess.
NONE have been placed anywhere near Taylorsville, where the three largest mobile home parks are. It is a huge failure of the local government to protect those that need it most.
I wonder if this bill is designed to make sure that even when the local government fails to protect those that need it, the state law will do it for them.
I’m so tired of legislation that enforces personal responsibility or, even worse, tries to inflict someone else’s sense of morality on everyone else. (My personal feeling about recent Internet gambling legislation.)
Spend money educating people to be smart and make the right choices – don’t spend money legislating and enforcing laws to deal with their resulting stupidity.
Doug,
I don’t know — doesn’t this seem like a plausible response to the Evansville tornado that lost Hostettler his seat?
As CNN reported:
stay ali
(source)
I think a nifty idea would be to use cell phone towers to broadcast such alerts to mobile phones. Hell, stick a tower on every Wal-Mart and other big box store; that’ll be in range the trailer parks for sure.
Then, come the next big tornado, dozens or hundreds of rural voters will survive to denigrate the worth of the state’s social services, and proudly vote Republican. Sounds like a sure-fire winner for the General Assembly to me.
Actually, there are no large stores anywhere near the three big parks in Bartholomew County.
Fine. Then I assume you would support ending all outdoor sirens, right? After all, if people made proper decisions and were educated properlly, then they would watch the weather and own a weather radio. However, who will pick up the bodies in the parks when people don’t make the right decision?
Personally, I would rather try to help people SURVIVE than help bury them. It is the same idea as the seatbelt law. We’re going either going to pay to enforce a seatbelt law, or we’re going to pay for more Lifeline medivac services as more people are more severly injured.
Unless you want to make sure that the first-responders check insurance cards before providing services, you end up paying either way. Might as well help before the bad thing, then clean up after.
This bill is named for one of the children killed in the Evansville tornado.
I believe it would be reasonable to require a weather radio in all NEW mobile homes. There is little cost related and the money would be worth it to save a life.
As an emergency worker, I’ve witnessed first hand what tornados can do (more than once actually). The BEST way to help victims of such events is not have them be victims to begin with.
One of the problems with the Evansville tornado was that weather radios that were designed to sound an alarm when tornado warnings are issued didn’t because of a problem at the NWS. Even people who may have had such radios would not have heard the alarms on that night, unfortunately.
Furthermore, IIRC, the tornado watches were not issued in time for the late news, which possibly could have saved lives. I believe that the Evansville area was put under a tornado watch (not warning) either after or only shortly before the tornado struck. I remember that night well, as the local sirens woke me up and spurred me to turn on the radio–the regular radio, not the weather radio. The radio announcer said that we were under a severe thunderstorm warning and then added that the area remained under a tornado watch. The last part really woke me up, as I’d checked the NWS website around midnight and had seen nothing about the possibility of severe weather occuring overnight. No Hazardouse Weather Outlook, no watches, etc. We were supposed to get rain overnight, and it appeared that rain was moving into the western part of the state. Despite what the NWS site had predicted, there were at least two severe thunderstorm warnings and one (radar-indicated) tornado warning issued between roughly 3 and 5 a.m. EST. in this area. Later that day I heard what had happened in Evansville.
I went to the Storm Prediction Center website a few days later and found out that my part of Indiana was put under a tornado watch only after the tornado had struck Evansville. Weather forecasting is difficult work, and I respect the people who do it. But I’m not sure that this proposed legislation will be effective. I’d rather that the NWS adopt a policy of getting tornado watches announced in time for the late local news. That may have made a difference in Evansville.