My stupid people rant

[Joe Wicked]

What is really wrong with people?
OK, first a little back ground. Our county sheriffs office has a system in place for emergencies that calls out to rural areas (like where I live) in emergencies. It was originally designed for Police, Fire and Medical emergencies only. The County Sheriff decided that it would be a good idea to also use it to notify rural areas in weather emergencies as well. Last year when I got a phone call telling me to take cover, a tornado was spotted touching down less than 2 miles from my house, I was extremely grateful to say the least. In the end, it did not come to my house, but I was still glad for the warning. We do not have cable TV available and the satellite was out due to the weather, so I would not have known about the tornado until it was too late otherwise. Just the other day we had another tornado warning but I did not get a call. Afterwards, I realized that the land lines were out, but cell phones still worked. Yesterday I emailed the Sheriffs office to request my cell phone be added to the system so if land lines were out but cell up, I would still get the call. I would rather get 2 calls instead of none in cases like this. I got this reply back:

I did get your email, however, we stopped using Code Red for weather situation due to the time it takes to reach the citizens. We have had major problems on two different occasions with fast moving storms going thru the area and citizens getting the message after the storms moved thru. After the first complaint we had the company reconfigure our calling areas into smaller areas but it still wasn’t fast enough. Needless to say, the complaints were not to understanding to this problem.



We are looking at a system which is just for weather emergencies that will do automatic notification using a different method of deployment. Due to the cost we are trying to get cooperation from the major cities in Collin County to go on the system as well.



Pam Palmisano

Support Services Major

Collin County Sheriff's Office

You live in an area that does not have a warning siren, and the County Sheriffs Department takes the initiative out of their current existing budget and systems to try to warn as many people as possible and people b*tch enough about how it is not good enough that they just give up on it. -rant off