*poopself

ALKDJFDLI! my house (in texas) is right underneath one of these. meaning the siren itself is attatched to the street light pole thats in my front yard. fucking corner lots. because i basically sleep right underneath the siren, the words coming out of it sound very distorted from inside my house.

i'm in fort worth, about 2 hours south of oklahoma, so there is a constant stream of tornados from march to june.

when i first bought my house, i had just left my exhusband, who had been off his meds too long and was often in trouble with the law because of it. i was also still using his last name, which sounds very similar to the word 'warning'. and the last 6 months of my marriage i lived in constant fear of the cops raiding my house. along with the fear of any other trouble or death he might get himself into.

so one spring day, a few weeks after i left him and moved in here, i was woken up from a dead nap and had no idea i was living underneath a siren. it sounded like a 10 cops in my front yard with bull horns yelling "holley warren, come outside immediately". given the circumstances i had just ran from, i wasn't in a good place mentally or logically, so i grabbed my kids from their beds and hid in the closet for 30 minutes, which incidentally, is a good place to hide in case of a tornado. but i was hiding from the cops, expecting them to bust down my front doors and haul me off to jail for being an accomplice to whatever shit he had pulled and take my kids away.

of course that didnt happen because the sirens were really saying "tornado warning, get inside immediately". i quit using the name "warren" after that. i also got some therapy.

oh, i've also noticed that the sirens haven't used the word "tornado" for a while.
they're now saying "severe weather warning". i wonder if that's because tornado season hasn't really hit yet or if they made the decision to change the words.

I guess it changed. I used to live between Ft Worth and Dallas. All of the sirens were at firehouses. They used them to signal shift changes, weather, and big fires.

I for one think they shouldn't be used unless something serious is taking place, specially when they are right in the middle of a residential area.

We would hear those sirens, drop whatever it was we were doing and take off for shelter. But since I went back no one does a damned thing.

They test these on the first Wednesday of the month where I live... TODAY!