As a tornado touched down in Belton, notifications said tornado warning cancelled
Officials are investigating the cause of five emergency alerts in Cass County that said the tornado warning was cancelled, at the same time an EF1 tornado barrelled through Belton.
At 5:14 p.m. on April 17, individuals signed up for Cass County emergency alerts received a message saying there was a tornado warning in Cass County. The calls, texts or emails were sent through Everbridge, an emergency management platform, to people who had signed up.
As the tornado first touched down in Belton at 5:19 p.m., those people received a message that said, “A Tornado Warning is no longer in effect for your area.”
And the messages just kept coming.
In 17 minutes, the notification was repeated a total of five times. At the same time, the tornado carved a more than two-mile curve through Cass County, bringing winds up to 110 miles per hour. The tornado ripped off roofs, flattened trees and toppled gravestones at the Belton Cemetery. No one was injured.
In fact, the tornado warning issued by the National Weather Service in Pleasant Hill was still in effect when the Everbridge messages were sent.
The erroneous messages, sent as the tornado tore a path through Belton, left area residents and officials confused by the discrepancy between the notifications claiming the tornado warning was cancelled and the other information they were receiving. As emergency management and weather officials concede, the situation was a cause for concern, for if someone in Belton had taken the notifications at face value and left their storm shelter, they could have been at higher risk of injury or death.
Now, as the investigation proceeds, the National Weather Service is advising residents to seek storm information from a variety of reliable sources.
Belton experiences
As sirens wailed the night of the tornado, Bill Anderson hunkered down in his basement a mile and a half away from the cemetery, Anderson told The Star by text. He could still hear them blaring as he received a message saying the tornado warning was over.
Dawn Jarboe Thomas was sitting in her car inside her lower-level garage in Belton when she received calls saying the tornado warning was over.
But she knew the storm was still raging. Local TV and a weather live stream were telling her differently. Thomas could hear debris hitting her garage door and “heard a quick and loud sound like a train, then the power went out.”
“Had it been anything above EF1, it would’ve been a lot worse,” she wrote.
Both Anderson and Thomas lost power, but that was the extent of their property damage.
Jonathan Kurtz, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said that most of the people he talked to realized the tornado warning was still in effect, despite the conflicting messages.
“The danger is that they’re not going to double-check and make sure that this is correct.”
What caused the messages?
The Cass County Emergency Services Board, National Weather Service and Everbridge are investigating the cause of the misleading notifications.
Everbridge did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Marie Beauchamp, the executive director of the Cass County Emergency Services Board, started receiving calls from Cass County residents immediately after the tornado.
“There’s definitely a concern on both ends: citizen and the Emergency Services Board,” Beauchamp said.
Beauchamp runs the board, which purchased and provides the Everbridge software to government organizations across the county.
The Cass County Emergency Services Board filed a support ticket with Everbridge, which has been escalated to a priority event, according to Beauchamp.
She said the ESB has not had an issue like this before. They have contracted with Everbridge for more than five years and pays approximately $51,000 a year for the services. The ESB will update the public once they get information from Everbridge, Beauchamp said.
The National Weather Service said they haven’t found abnormalities with their communications about the Belton tornado, according to Kurtz.
“We’ve looked through our text and everything looks very normal on our side,” Kurtz said.
The NWS distributes severe weather information through the NOAA Weather Wire Service, which is picked up by third party organizations like TV stations, navigation apps and alert companies like Everbridge.
“The warning was never cancelled from our office when that alert had gone out,” Kurtz said.
The NWS shared information with both Cass County and Everbridge to help with the investigation.
Kurtz recommended residents use a combination of local media, apps like The Weather Channel or Accuweather, weather radios and wireless emergency alerts.
“It’s really important … for folks to have multiple ways to get weather information, especially tornado warnings.”
