Working Toward a Weather-Ready Southern New England: Some Unique Challenges and Successful Outreach Methodologies

Southern New England can present some unique challenges to achieving successful preparedness.

Although the region experiences a full range of weather threats (blizzards to hurricanes) and associated socioeconomic impacts, it is rare that we have a situation that directly results in injuries or deaths and thus the public at large has a lower awareness of those life threatening situations. This means that sometimes unique approaches need to be taken for outreach events to ensure a high level of audience engagement. In addition, the structure of governments results in increased complexity in many of the preparedness activities in which the National Weather Service (NWS) Boston/Norton offices takes part.

In southern New England, there is no county government, so for the NWS StormReady program, it is necessary to work with each individual local town Emergency Manager – more than 500 in NWS Boston/Norton’s area of responsibility. In January, 2018, Rhode Island became the fifth state to become completely StormReady, but the first state to be StormReady down to the individual community level. This presentation will discuss how NWS Boston/Norton streamlined the StormReady approval process by enlisting the help of the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency (RIEMA), aided by a vision of both the Governor and the RIEMA Director. Key to the success was the state’s investment in the program, which included purchasing lightning detectors and NOAA Weather Radios for each township, along with giving the townships a reimbursable grant incentive for further weather-/outreach-related purchases.

Another topic that will be discussed is achieving successful outreach through the use of humor and song. When audiences are fully engaged and laughing at interspersed humor, they have fun and also more readily retain the critical preparedness information that is being shown. Over the years, NWS Boston/Norton has received feedback reaffirming that this has been the case. The presentation will touch upon some examples of such outreach styles, including partnering with local TV meteorologists to produce parody videos to help foster close relationships with them and the Emergency Management communities and the use of music to enliven talks.