Meteorologists from the National Weather Service’s Fort Worth office presented the town’s fourth consecutive StormReady designation to Prosper’s Fire Rescue and Emergency Management team during a July 23 Town Council meeting.
“We really are happy to recognize you all for what you guys have achieved to keep your community safe from weather hazards,” said Tom Bradshaw, the meteorologist in charge at the Fort Worth office.
What it means
The StormReady designation is a process and training opportunity to help communities understand how to get weather warnings out to residents and work with other jurisdictions and the National Weather Service.
“You look at how you train and you educate people for the next storm,” Bradshaw said. “There’s always going to be another storm.”
According to the National Weather Service’s website, a StormReady community must:
- Establish a 24-hour warning point and emergency operations center
- Have more than one way to receive severe weather warnings and forecasts, and to alert the public
- Create a system that monitors weather conditions locally
- Promote the importance of public readiness through community seminars
- Develop a formal hazardous weather plan, which includes training severe weather spotters and holding emergency exercises.
Only 121 of Texas’ over 1,200 municipalities have earned the designation, Bradshaw said.
“When you think of the thousands of communities, or hundreds at least, that exist across the state of Texas, to be one of the 121 really says a lot about this community,” he said.
The Dallas-Fort Worth area’s other StormReady cities include Frisco, Denton, Addison, Richardson, Plano and Lewisville.
Approximately 3,474 sites—including cities and large facilities such as military bases, theme parks or college campuses—across the U.S. are StormReady, according to the National Weather Service’s website.
Diving deeper
Prosper and its surrounding communities saw multiple storms in late spring, Bradshaw said.
One item Prosper council members approved during the July 23 meeting was allocating funds to fix an irrigation system damaged by a lightning strike at Whitley Place Park.
“It really brings to home what kind of impacts we can really have here in North Texas,” he said.
