Longview city staff say there’s a good reason why warning sirens never sounded before an early morning tornado this week — there was no National Weather Service alert.
Weather service analysts in Shreveport confirmed that an EF-1 tornado — with wind speeds between 100 and 119 mph — touched down at 5:38 a.m. Wednesday and traveled 7 miles across North Longview. The tornado uprooted trees and damaged roofs of homes and businesses in its path.
The city’s emergency notification and weather warning system notifies residents of tornado warnings and other mass emergencies using warning sirens placed around the city, plus its CodeRED system that sends prerecorded alerts to people’s phones after they sign up for the service.
“All of our CodeRED Weather Warn calls and any authorized siren activations are based upon those National Weather Service designations,” city spokesman Shawn Hara said. “The only exception that Public Safety Communications would make on sounding the sirens would be if a certified storm-spotter advised to do so.”
Mario Valverde, a weather service meteorologist in Shreveport, said radar operators working that morning had issued a special weather statement of inclement weather with high winds coming to the Northeast Texas region, but no warning for tornadoes or severe thunderstorms were issued for Gregg County.
“(We) had not seen any identifiable tornado features (in radar), and we had no reports from our storm spotters that were out there, or (law enforcement) of anything that was occurring at the time,” Valverde said.
It’s the first time this year that the weather service in Shreveport recorded a tornado in which it issued no specific warning, he said, but it’s not rare.
“I wish we could be 100 percent accurate all the time, but we’re not. This probably happens once or twice a year where we find out after the fact,” Valverde said. “So far, I think we’ve probably issued … 50 tornado warnings this year.”
The city has directed all inquiries about why Longview was not placed under a tornado watch or warning this week to the National Weather Service’s Shreveport office at (318) 631-3669, Hara said.
“It’s just one of those things — everyone needs to be aware that in springtime in Texas, tornadoes can happen, especially very early in the morning,” Valverde said. “These small tornadoes spin up very, very quickly.”
by Jimmy Isaac
March 31, 2017 at 11:40 p.m.
