Breaking in the new: Severe Weather Siren

This is a new one for everyone. I became very accustomed to the sudden onset of severe summer weather in Indiana -- watches and warnings were extremely common, for severe thunderstorms, hail storms, and even the odd tornado here and there. But the means of finding out about these situations was always on TV, as when a blizzard hits Boston and every channel has news and weather people in little tiny windows, while the rest of the screen is taken up with maps and crawl graphics.

We'd heard the town siren before, but always in the middle of the day. This time, it went off a little after 3:30 this morning, freaking Kim out and sending to both of us into the kitchen to see what was up. (She's got a thing about tornadoes, as would most normal people, I suppose.) Lo and behold, we were in the middle of the most severe rain we've had since we got here.

This was major stuff -- wind bending trees, rain almost horizontal to the ground, rapid-fire lightning that made it seem much more like a fireworks display. Chikage Windler (formerly of Channel 7), sans makeup and in a deserted studio, showed a Dopplar radar map that was almost exclusively red and covered in little lightning bolts.

Truth be told, we need this rain badly -- the only positive thing about the incredibly dry summer we've had here is that the low levels of the Mississippi River aided in helping the search for victims of the bridge collapse. The siren, however, will take some getting used to.