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Portion Of NOAA Radio Alert System Failed During Storms

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By NEIL JOHNSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 13, 2008

TAMPA - When storms were hammering most of Florida on Tuesday, the weather service's alert radio system for Melbourne and Orlando went off the air, one for more than four hours.

A problem with a telephone line linking the National Weather Service office in Melbourne to the NOAA Weather Radio transmitters kept the system from broadcasting alerts about the stormy conditions.

Problems with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration radios didn't prevent alerts from reaching the public. Systems that relay warnings to television and radio stations as well as going out by cell phone still functioned, said David Sharp, meteorologist with the Melbourne weather office.

He did not know what caused the problem with the phone line.

The weather office in Ruskin uses the same type of system that sends warnings typed by a forecaster to the transmitters by phone line that are broadcast by a computer-generated voice.

Ryan Sharp, meteorologist in the Ruskin office that covers the Tampa Bay area, said the system could go off the air if the phone line fails. A separate line alerts the weather office if transmitters aren't receiving the signal.

Forecasters immediately would contact Verizon, the phone company serving the weather office, Sharp said.

Repairing such an important outage would rise to the top of the company's priority list, said Ben Elek, Verizon spokesman.

"If that happened, we'd be all over it immediately," he said.

Utilities rank restoring service to places involving public safety such as police, fire, hospitals and emergency management as the top priority. The weather office would fall in that category, Elek said.

The danger of losing the NOAA radio largely depends on the time of day the broadcasts fail, said Holley Wade, spokeswoman for Hillsborough County Emergency Management.

The Melbourne weather service radios failed at 3:25 p.m. The Orlando area radio was back on line at 6:25 p.m. and the Melbourne area at 7:50 p.m.

The radio failure occurred well after a tornado struck a condominium near Cocoa Beach about 10 a.m.

Wade said that during that time of day many people are getting emergency information from other sources such as broadcast radio, television, the Internet or cell phone alerts.

A failure during the middle of the night would cause more worry.

"If it had been overnight, it would be a much bigger concern," Wade said. "Overnight when people are sleeping is when weather radios become more important."

The radios, available for about $20, are battery powered and sound a tone and the forecaster's statement when the weather service issues various storm warnings.

Neither Ruskin's Sharp nor Wade could recall a time when the local NOAA radios failed when severe weather threatened as it did Tuesday afternoon and evening

Sharp, the forecaster in Melbourne, said that during the radio failure meteorologists maintained telephone contact with emergency management offices in the affected counties.

Reporter Neil Johnson can be reached at (813) 259-7731 or njohnson@tampatrib.com.

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