One type of alert to rely upon is never enough. That gives you one single point of failure. Seconds count in the event of a tornado. Tornado’s, are still to this day highly unpredictable, but have gotten better with advanced warnings. Sirens can fail, people can make a wrong judgement call behind the alert. Your phone alert can fail, your texts could never come through. You can lose power. Your cable or the television broadcast can go out.
A question often arises, how many services and alerts should I have? The answer is simple, as many as feasibly possible. Weather radio? Yes! Should not be an option. The basic weather radio such as the one I own that alerts on everything in your county works very well! I have had it for years and years and it has been a reliable little radio. It has battery backup as well. Just remember to change out those batteries every daylight savings time like your smoke detectors. Price Chopper carries these as well as Walmart. Some weather radios have the ability to add a flashing strobe for those that are hearing impaired as well. Other weather radios have the ability to filter out alerts you don’t want to be woken up to, such as flash flooding. I am actually eyeballing the Midland WR400 Deluxe weather radio. This radio is a combination weather/alarm clock, also has a USB charging port for your phone. This will free up space having both an alarm clock and my weather radio taking up space on my end table next to my bed.
Then there is the cell phone alerts. Here in Blue Springs we have a service put out by CJCEMA called Nixle where you receive texts to your phone. If you do not have Nixle you can sign up here.
There are plenty of weather apps for phones out there that can be used as well. One of the popular one’s I use are Wunderground and Windy which both are free. Then from a storm spotter perspective I also use a purchased app called Radar Scope (about 10 bucks) which is where the clips of radar I post on my Facebook page come from. It has a monthly subscription that gives radar scope a lot more options as well.