Bees, Tornadoes, and Jellyfish

My daughter has a recurring nightmare involving tornadoes.

This may be my fault. Once I was watching the movie "Twister" when she was pretty young, and I think it made a permanent impression.

On top of that, we do have frequent tornadoes and--as opposed to where I grew up--I take the tornado siren seriously. We really do go and sit in the closet when it goes off.

Growing up, we didn't live anywhere near a tornado siren. We were also in an area totally ignored by the local weather broadcast. It was as if we didn't exist as far as KTHI, WDAZ, and KXJB were concerned. We were NEVER included in the evening stats and predictions, we weren't on their map, and hell, we had more than one tornado over the years that was NEVER MENTIONED on the news. This isn't because we were on the edge of their broadcast--most towns all around us got coverage. Smaller towns than us consistently were told what temps to expect in their town the next day, but Warren, Minnesota? Never. Or almost never.

Once. Exactly once in the 18 years I lived in that town, did they acknowledge that any weather even occurred in Warren. It happened to be the day that my sister's science class was studying weather prediction, and called it in to the TV station, strongly encouraging them to put it on their broadcast. So once, it appeared on TV, and let me point out--they didn't even have to do the predicting themselves. All they had to do was type it in.

It wasn't that we weren't ever included; that wasn't too bad. It was they way they INSINUATED that since they weren't predicting the weather in our town, there WAS no weather going on in our town.

"Blizzard hit Warren? It's not on our radar. Must not be too bad."

Years later, the TV stations went through some ownership changes, and a lot of on-air talent changes, and also I think my town (and a few others) led a revolt. It was probably associated with the Flood of '97, in that other towns with LESS to worry about were given more information about the pre-flood conditions. In other words, loss of property and possible loss of life had to occur before the local meteorologists discovered that weather in Warren, Minnesota does in fact exist.

(Oh, that and Doppler and NEXRAD.)