The city of Mobile was named StormReady by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service, a designation that certifies a community has the communication and safety systems in place to warn its residents and protect property when severe weather arrives.
The recognition landed at the beginning of hurricane season, in a city that needed no reminder of what was at stake.
What StormReady actually means
The StormReady program was created to arm American communities with the communication and safety skills they need to save lives and protect property. To earn the designation, a community must meet guidelines established by the National Weather Service in partnership with federal, state and local emergency management professionals.
The certification is not ceremonial. In general terms, the program requires that a community demonstrate:
- A 24-hour warning point and emergency operations center capable of receiving weather information at any hour
- Multiple ways to receive National Weather Service warnings and to alert the public
- Local monitoring capability for severe weather conditions
- Community preparedness programs, including public education and safety talks
- A formal hazardous weather plan, with exercises and regular contact between local officials and the Weather Service
In other words, the designation says that when the Weather Service issues a warning at three in the morning, somebody in Mobile is awake to receive it and knows exactly what to do next.
Why this city
No community in Alabama had a more direct education in severe weather than Mobile. Hurricane Frederic in 1979 remade the city’s skyline and its building codes. Hurricane Georges came in 1998. Hurricane Ivan struck in 2004. Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005, pushed a surge into the Mobile River, flooded downtown streets, tore up the causeway and devastated the fishing communities at the bottom of the county.
Beyond the hurricanes, the Gulf Coast contends with a full menu of hazards: tornadoes spun off by tropical systems, severe thunderstorms, flash flooding on flat coastal terrain, and the winter storms that occasionally paralyze a region with almost no equipment to handle ice.
The value of the paperwork
It is easy to be dismissive of a certification program. A plaque does not stop a storm.
But the value of StormReady lies in what a city must do to qualify. A community pursuing the designation has to inventory its warning systems, identify the gaps, establish who is responsible at each hour of the day, build relationships with the local Weather Service forecast office, and write down the plan. Much of emergency management is precisely that unglamorous: knowing in advance who calls whom, and on what equipment, when the power is out and the cell towers are overloaded.
The communities that fail in a disaster are rarely the ones that lacked courage. They are the ones that had never worked out the details in advance.
A shared coastline
Mobile’s designation placed it among a growing number of StormReady communities nationwide. For a coastal city where the difference between a well-warned population and a surprised one can be measured in lives, the certification was a modest but genuine piece of infrastructure, the kind built out of meetings, radios and plans rather than concrete.