Weather radios make for big protection

MOBILE, Ala. - A Baldwin County family was practically saved by a weather radio. As it turns out, those small machines can make for big protection.

The past few days have been quite busy at the National Weather Service in Mobile. "The weather's got us again with round 3," said NWS meteorologist Jeff Garmon.

"It's coming in Friday night, so everybody needs to be aware of what's going on in the weather department."

So, if John Edd Thompson's not on the television screen, then it's time to turn on the radio, the weather radio.

"Weather radios have gotten smarter over the years," Garmon said. "It's able to now, instead of warn for large, geographical area, we can now pin it down to a county or portions of county."

If you don't want to know about alerts outside your living area, you can input a code for your county.

"Say we issue a tornado warning for Citronelle," explained Garmon, "the people in Gulf Shores might not be concerned about that, so they can set their weather radio up not to alarm them for the warnings in areas like Citronelle."

Garmon said hazard radios should be as common a household item as smoke detectors.

"It'll wake you up in the middle of the night so you can go to your commercial radio and flip on that and get more information on what's going on in your location."