Report: Warnings didn't convey June storm's power

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (AP) -- The National Weather Service failed to fully warn residents about the dangers posed by an unusually powerful thunderstorm that pummeled Fort Wayne last June and cut power to thousands of homes, an internal agency review has concluded.

The review found that forecasters did a good job of issuing warnings about the fast-moving storm that hit the city June 29 before traveling all the way to the East Coast.

But it also concluded that while those warnings included information about the storm's dangerous winds, technological limitations left people unaware of the storm's full potency.

Photo Gallery: June 29 severe storm brings rain, destruction

The warnings issued during the storm were a new type of alert tested last year by the weather service that puts the most pertinent information at the top of each warning, said Michael Lewis, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service's northern Indiana office.

However, Lewis said that at the time of the storm the weather service's Syracuse, Ind., office didn't have the necessary computer software to quickly decode those more complex warnings to highlight the storm's biggest threats in its alerts.
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"So while we were calling for 90 to 100 mph winds, that wasn't being communicated," said. "There was this interpretation that it's just a severe thunderstorm warning. There was more to it."

The report found that same situation occurred throughout the 600-mile path of the storm.

The storm was a rare severe thunderstorm called a "derecho" -- a large, powerful and long-lasting straight-line wind storm that swept from Chicago to Washington, killing at least 13 people and leaving 3 million without power, The Journal Gazette reported (http://bit.ly/YfHSPV ).

"Despite the use of enhanced wording in many of the warnings, nearly everyone interviewed was surprised by the intensity of the winds with this derecho," the report said. "As a result, most people surveyed did not take any special precautions as the storms moved through their area."

In Fort Wayne, the storm toppled hundreds of trees and left more than 118,000 people without power, some of them for more than a week during a record heat wave.

Lewis said the weather service has become more precise in its warnings and now issues those alerts not in the form of simple squares but more complex shapes covering the areas in a storm's path.

But he said most alert systems can issue those warnings only by county, leading to more warnings that are unnecessary and weaken the impact of the alerts. Lewis said that's especially important because people already underestimate the danger of thunderstorms.
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   Information from: The Journal Gazette, http://www.journalgazette.net