I agree 100% with your blog entry. In Portugal, there are sirens that go off when there are major fires in the mountains and that could threaten villages and small towns/cities. If they can have sirens, surely we can have some in Saskatchewan for a major emergancy like a Tornado.

Sadly, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that it will take a major catastrophy before anyone does anything - and that's shameful.

Sure it would be possible to build a siren loud enough that you'd only need a few, but they would be so ridiculously loud that anyone near them would only hear them once because they'd be deaf after the first blast. How about we try paying attention to big booming thunder claps, high winds, etc instead? You know, the way that has worked for thousands of years prior. Of course new fangled technology like radios can be used in a pinch.

When I was growing up in Vancouver the city would use the old WW II air raid sirens for alerts. They were tested yearly and came in handy several times. There was one at the end of our laneway and it serviced a huge area. (Even in Vancouver they wouldn't have had 1500 of them.) Sirens are really needed at night time when we can't visually assess the weather. The storm this weekend that hit us east of the city came at midnight. Some of my neighbours slept through it. Goes to show we can't rely on the booming thunder all the time.
Thanks you your station and Twitter we can be safer this year than last.

Your argument is not new -- indeed, it is essentially the same put forth in a fairly famous (in Natural Hazards research circles, anyway) 1972 paper by Sims & Baumann. In it they espoused that technological fixes were a better coping style than simply being weather-wise and watching the sky. This paper was so classic in its folly that I STILL use it to show students how bad research can be. In many places where tornadoes are more frequent (and we simply do not get that many or of sufficient magnitude) the old civil defense system of air raid sirens have been converted to tornado alerts. It has not eliminated "death by tornado" and indeed, the best coping strategy is to simply be aware of the hazard -- armed with good sense and whatever information that can be additionally available. We long ago took out the air raid sirens and I suspect that you could furnish every home in Regina with a weather radio at a lower cost than creating the infrastructure needed for your anachronistic proposal.

Prince Albert had a number of air raid sirens through out the city, but they were removed about 20 years ago. I think a warning system such as you see in the states with the "Emergency Broadcast System" is the smarter way to go.

True not everyone has a TV on all the time, Not everyone has a radio on all the time, but I bet at least one person on every block has on of these on at every give hour of the day. If you hear that warning and see your neighbor out siad, yell at them!

Sirens are a good idea in theory but the reality is after a few false alarms, people will ignore them or demand that they be removed. I have lost count of how many times I have seen tornado watches and warnings and I have yet to see anything resembling a tornado. When you cry wolf enough times,people ignore you.

Your argument reminds me of the saying 'for every complex problem there is a simple solution that almost never works'.

Actually, this is surprising really. Think about it, on the one hand we get fed this 'We are booming, Saskatchewan has money' whenever something like a Carbon tax comes up or whatever but then, when we want something for ourselves, all of a sudden the governments are playing 'Polly Poor boy' and claiming they cannot afford it.

If we are booming then WHERE IS OUR MONEY!!!!

Even if it did take 1500 sirens to alert Regina (probably false) We supposedly have the money now (according to the media sources we are 'booming', we are the 'place to be')so lets improve our society.

If the gov will not spend on the poeple then what are they keeping the money for? Who's money is it if the money cannot be used to make our lives and society better?

I am confused, do we have money or do we not have money? If so, then spending it on our own society is a good investment. If not then why were we told that we did have it to begin with?

"Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong"

I don't know anything about sirens --- but I've been saying the same basic thing since the blizzard a year or so ago. Why did we all go to work that morning? They knew the blizzard was coming the previous day, so wouldn't it have been smart to institute some kind of emergency procedure? School and work are cancelled for the morning until the danger passes, that sort of thing. Instead, we sent children off to school --- and parents had to go back out into the storm to get them home safely! How many kids could have lost their lives? Is everyone showing up at work and school for one morning more important than even one single life? You could easily go back to work in the afternoon if the blizzard doesn't happen, if making sure commerce happens is oh-so-important. You're correct, John. We don't take these things seriously at all.