Featured image: Independence County Judge Kevin Jeffery (second from right) and Independence County OEM Director Bill Johnson (far right, next to Jeffery) with National Weather Service officials.
A weather safety project two years in the making recently came to fruition for Independence County.
The National Weather Service (NWS) says the county is now StormReady — a designation for communities and areas well prepared for severe weather. National Weather Service officials awarded Independence County Judge Kevin Jeffery and the county’s Office of Emergency Management Director Bill Johnson with a StormReady certificate at a recent ceremony.
According to the National Weather Service, StormReady “…uses a grassroots approach to help communities develop plans to handle all types of extreme weather — from tornadoes to winter storms. The program encourages communities to take a new, proactive approach to improving local hazardous weather operations by providing emergency managers with clear-cut guidelines on how to improve their hazardous weather operations.”
NWS officials say a StormReady community must:
- Establish a 24-hour warning point and emergency operations center.
- Have more than one way to receive severe weather warnings and forecasts and to alert the public.
- Create a system that monitors weather conditions locally .
- Promote the importance of public readiness through community seminars.
In an interview with Jonesboro television station KAIT, Johnson said it was a lengthy process.
“We went through a pretty intensive checklist of updating our warning systems and how we receive our alerts,” Johnson told KAIT’s Hayden Savage.
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