PieFed DKMeteorologists Say the National Weather Service Did Its Job in Texas
www.wired.com/story/meteorologists-say-the-nati…
Mastodon bots which mirror the NWS warnings back them up
What failed was local officials not succeeding in alerting people — in large part because they had plan or mechanism available to do so with the roughly one-hour warning that current meteorology can provide for specific flash floods like this.
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The agency had issued a flash flood emergency alert by 4:30am.
But as local outlet KXAN first reported, it appears that the first flood warnings posted from safety officials to the public were sent out on Facebook at 5am, hours after the NWS issued its warning.
They use Xitter and Facebook for warning people? You can't be serious... How do they not have a national alert system to send out alerts directly to phones? European countries have these and they are regularly tested too.
Not everybody has a Xitter or Facebook account 🤷♂️
governments nowadays use multiple media. it's not much effort compared to how many more people they can reach. in my region (EU) they use cell broadcast, social media, radio, tv, sirens and multiple warning apps. the idea is, to make it very unlikely to miss, even if one channel malfunctions or like when your phone is off.
sqw
And if you read the whole article, the same meteorologists state that the funding cuts are also a big reason for things like this happening, so the headline is disingenuous.
How is it every time a silver single gets lost everyone's phone turns into a siren yet they can't figure out how to use it for a deadly flood.
Most states know how. Just not Texas.
You know whats big about texas?? Death tolls due to natural disasters they can't prepare for
Well they can, they choose not to.
And death tolls due to school shootings the cops wait outside for.
But they can everyone in Brownsville know that someone shot a cop in the panhandle.
Almost like people flee to Mexico after committing a crime.
People in Texarkana get the same alerts. They're statewide. It has nothing to do with Brownsville particularly. I just picked someplace far away from the panhandle.
The first part is the reason for the second part: the alert system isn’t targeted enough so people disable it due to the majority of the alerts being disruptive but not applicable.
So the 20 girls that are missing, they’re just going to leave it at that, eh?
No, but its better to understand what happened instead of some fiction being pushed by local officials.
When you do frequent midnight alerts for missing elderly, people disable the alerts on their phone entirely. Then when disaster hits, they don't know its coming. And because no planning was done for it, they can't evacuate a camp full of kids quickly enough even if they know what's about to happen.
Actually preventing this kind of thing means maintaining preparedness for decades when nothing happens.
I’m reminded of the time cops woke up the entire state of Texas at 5AM, to say a dude named Sam Altman shot at a cop near Amarillo. They issued a Blue Alert for the entire state. For reference, many Texans were more than an 8 hour drive away from where it happened. Yeah, shit like that gets emergency notifications muted.
I vented on a local Facebook group when that happened. Saying that the continued police abuse of the emergency alert system would quickly cause the alerts to mean nothing. I frequently also got amber alerts for the opposite end of the state, well over twelve hours away.
To say that my concern was an unpopular opinion would be a massive understatement. People were downright hostile. A lot of locals could never fathom that what I was saying was true. And they used all the four letter words to tell me so. A sheriff's deputy called me a godless cop hater and a disgusting person.
Fortunately that particular cop is unemployed for abusing his power and some domestic abuse allegations. Oh and trying to fight his neighbor while in uniform.
And and I'm still right. They abused the alert system so much it is useless. And children and the elderly and innocent paid that price with their lives.
Yes, 100% you're right.
I don't think "godless cop hater" was the insult he thought it was.
Last year we had heavy rain. Every time the flash flood advisory was extended, a new "wake the dead" alert went out. These alerts ignored my phone's audio settings and were very loud.
After around the 7th alarm between, iirc, 3 pm and 10 pm I disabled the alerts. I was too on edge by the idea of another alarm to fall asleep.
I'm not sure I turned those alarms back on.
I suggest checking.
Fine, they're back on. But I'm only allowing Extreme alerts. The flash flood updates were Severe alerts and I'm not dealing with that bullshit again.
Foam mattresses float. Just keep a bottle of water and a hand axe under your pillow 👍
There’s a blue alert? Jfc. It’s pathetic that they think we care.
Do people really get these false alerts? I don’t recall ever getting one that wasn’t local
Where I live, we've gotten alerts at 2 or 3 am because someone shot at police in a completely different city an hour or two away.
I kept shutting it off because of all those fucking amber alerts. Don’t get kidnapped, shit. Grandma at least has dementia to blame.
Missing kid in a silver Nissan Altima!
Yeah I see dozens of them every time I go out, if I'm actually looking and not focusing on navigatiting. But I also don't go out often enough for it to matter, even if it happened anywhere near me.
Besides, most of those events are just one of the divorced parents taking the kid without permission, or overrunning weekend visitation, and are resolved within a few hours.
And that is exactly why they've become useless. Amber alerts should not have been the knee jerk reaction in custody disputes. They should have been reserved for kidnappings and child abductions, not because a pare t is huffy about overstaying the weekend visit at mom or dad's.
27, and for now they're still just considered missing. It is possible they reached higher ground of some sort and just haven't been able to contact due to loss of electronics. In the other (unfortunately more likely) scenario their families would have to be informed before media reporting.
I'm still waiting for the Dog Butcher of Dakota to claim the DHS now believes radical migrants that Biden let in took the girls from the flood waters and trafficked them to South America, so they're calling off the search and launching military action against Panama to retake the Canal and save the little girls.
Or some equally bat shit fuckwadery.