Posted on 05/20/2013 12:46:11 PM PDT by dirtboy
A good number of homes around the school are completely gone.
It can definitely hurt to be on the safe side.
The problem of false alarms can be crippling. In my day job I worry about things like antisubmarine warfare. The main problem is you have an enormous number of false alarms (whales, rocks, etc). You can't drop a lightweight torpedo on every contact because then you're out of torpedoes in a day or so. So you have to wait (often for an extended period) to classify the contact before you attack it. In the meantime, depending on where the contact is, it may sink one of your ships first. You have to balance those risks.
One of the most pernicious delusions is that human life is priceless. It most obviously isn't, or life insurance payouts would be infinite, and all cars smaller than a big SUV or Cadillac would be illegal, and the SUVs and Cadillacs would have $100,000 more in safety features. Various economic studies have been able to estimate the price of a human life.
The overall cost to society of the perhaps weeks of education lost to millions of children if policy was to close schools every time an area was in an SPC risk area is greater than the cost to society of a few dozen kids being killed. And that's anomalous, on AVERAGE you are probably seeing maybe 1-3 children killed/year by tornadoes in school.
And one could make the case that among those millions of hours of lost education are a few smart kids that could have gone on to medical school if they hadn't missed out on those hours of instruction, and found cures for diseases that kill thousands.
And of course has been probably already pointed out in many, if not most cases the children are safer in school than at home.
Us, too!
You still aren’t getting it. The National Weather Service forecast a LOW probability of EF-2+ storms. You don’t react in any special manner to such watches. You get those all the time in Oklahoma. This storm was an utter freak event.
“The overall cost to society of the perhaps weeks of education lost to millions of children”
You’re kidding, right? This is government school we are talking about.
No, you are still not getting it. I don’t care what the NWS said, all our local forecasters said “Duck!”
Just gut wrenching. There are just no words others than prayers lifted to the heavens. So unbelievably sad.
Whatever one thinks of homeschooling, it’s pretty obvious that most of the population is either not qualified to teach their children or because of their economics and job situation, are not available to, and some education is better than no education.
A child calls to his father after being pulled from the rubble of the Tower Plaza Elementary School following a tornado in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013.
A woman carries a child through a field near the collapsed Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013.
Had a storm move through Siloam Springs, AR about 6:30. Possible small tornado.
Power went out and just came back on.
I am getting it. I pay a lot of attention to weather. And I spent eight years in Oklahoma. The chance of a lot of tornadoes is vastly different than the chance of major tornadoes. There was NOTHING in the NWS watch for the area to raise any particular concern, unlike 1999. And that is one reason why the death toll will be higher with this storm. Please just take it elsewhere.
Local forecaster.... local.
Ya know, this country has doubtless ended up with tons of clueless morons, but there are still a LOT of good AMERICANS out here too !
Please do us all a favor and put a sock in it. You have no idea what you are blathering about. The chance of tornadoes is different than the chance of a devastating tornado. And a house is no more survivable than a school unless they have a storm shelter.
To be precise, in 1999 there actually was only a slight risk that morning, it was upgraded to Moderate at 11:15AM.
For today there was a moderate, I believe, beginning yesterday or the day before. But that's fairly routine 9 times out of 10 you get a few tornadoes out in some field somewhere.
Idiot from Rhode Island - probably blamed destruction from Sandy on AGW also.
I disagree. I vividly remember a High risk in 1999.
I've come to believe that this is not true.
I know this sound radical. It is. But there are two things to consider.
First, education and schooling are not synonymous, but are often opposed.
Secondly, from a historical perspective, Americans were better educated in the pre-compulsory schooling era, i.e., pre 1852.
"Free public education." --Plank #10, Communist Manifesto, 1848
First compulsory attendance laws passed. --Massachusetts, 1852.
You live in OK and you don’t have one? You better get one soon!
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