How hundreds of tornadoes led one man to seek communication improvements amidst deadly weather events.
April 25, 2011, was the beginning of a four-day “super-outbreak” of tornadoes that rampaged across the southeastern U.S., smashing both property and weather records as it went, and leaving an estimated 321 people dead.
“The death toll just shook me to the core,” says James Spann, a broadcast meteorologist at a television station in Birmingham, Alabama. His market covers a large part of the state, the hardest hit in the April 2011 outbreak. “What we learned on that day is that what we do is just not enough,” says Spann.
“What began as a study that aimed to explore the ways people process risk became a window for our whole field into the single deadliest tornado outbreak in decades,” she says. “Everyone wanted to know what had happened. I had the right questions and protocol ready to go when the event happened to help them understand.”
Part of the solution to this problem may be education. Klockow-McClain is a big proponent of teaching broadcasters about specific cues that audiences look for to inform their decision making. “We’re helping them tell the weather story with a little more detail,” she says.
She also points out that in the past meteorologists tended to simply tell the public when and what to do. That approach didn’t work well. “I found that most people aren’t just blindly responding. They’re really trying to understand what’s going on,” she says. “We’re trying to get people to where they feel like they’re in control and know what to do. It’s not enough to communicate about the hazard. We really have to give people the information they need to know how and when to take action.