(KNSI) – Two tornado drills will occur Thursday statewide as part of Severe Weather Awareness Week.
The first siren is set to sound at 1:45 p.m. The second has been strategically slated for five hours later. Stearns County Emergency Manager Erin Hughes explains the reasoning for the schedule. “Maybe you’re going to be at school for one or at home for the next, or you’re at work, or you’re going to be at church. Whatever the case may be, the two different times allow for you to practice what you should be doing, or at least talk through what you’d be doing in different environments.”
The Department of Natural Resources tracks the number of tornadoes each year across the state. Minnesota averages 46. The most was 113 in 2010. The agency admits tornadoes are extremely rare when talking about their impact on any particular location, but the conditions that help spawn them are not, usually occurring across central Minnesota multiple times a year. Sometimes, it is as much as a dozen.
Hughes notes that someone may not have a ton of warning about a twister due to the radar gap that exists on the western end of Stearns County. “We start to see a different level of coverage about two-thirds of the way through the county. So, maybe between Freeport and Melrose area, down through St. Martin to Eden Valley, and then west of there, we are having less low-level radar coverage.”
Stearns County is nearly 1,400 square miles, and officials in St. Cloud are an hour away from cities like Belgrade, Brooten, or Sauk Centre. This makes staying on top of rapidly changing weather conditions nearly impossible.
The county relies heavily on trained storm spotters. Hughes says somewhere between 100 and 150 people take the classes each spring.
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