The stakes were serious. A tornado was about to hit Fort Lauderdale, and residents received the loud warning on their cellphones: They needed to “take shelter now.”
Outside restaurants in downtown Fort Lauderdale, a chorus of emergency alerts blared out simultaneously on scores of phones.
Despite the urgency of the message, there was little reaction by diners or pedestrians. Some glanced up at the dark skies, but few could be seen moving indoors or taking cover. Pedestrians walked on and diners silenced their phones and returned to their cocktails and meals.
The emergency marked an instance of some people not paying much attention to the warnings. No one was hurt when the tornado barreled through. Forecasters on Monday reminded the public that such public-safety warnings aren’t to be taken lightly: They’re very selective about when warnings are issued.
“We always want to be as proactive as possible — we’d rather give people lead time and occasionally have a false alarm. There’s a balance,” National Weather Service meteorologist Nick Carr said. “You don’t want to cry wolf, but you don’t want to be so conservative that you have to be sure there’s a tornado or you’re never going to issue it, because then you worry about not warning people enough.”
In fact, with a strong frontal boundary descending on South Florida on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, the threat of more tornadoes continues.
The National Weather Service has a wind advisory up for Tuesday, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and expects sustained winds from 20 to 30 mph with gusts as high 50 mph. Forecasters warned of dangerous beach and sea conditions through the middle of the week, and issued a gale warning due to high winds.
Toppling trees
At 5:46 p.m. Saturday, the tornado warning bleared through thousands of smartphones in the Fort Lauderdale area. Sixty seconds later, a tornado indeed reached down from the low dark clouds above the Lauderdale Yacht Club in Rio Vista Isles and for three minutes barreled along a 1.5-mile path to the northeast, through neighborhoods, across the New River and grids of canals, finally lifting back up into the skies above Las Olas Isles.
It toppled boat masts, uprooted trees, threw an awning and metal frame 400 feet across a canal, then snapped power lines, flames and sparks funneling up its vortex.
At one construction site, it blew over a portable toilet. Apparently no one was inside.
The National Weather Service estimates the twister had a maximum width of 100 yards and peak wind speeds of 70 to 80 mph, though they say most of the damage occurred in the 60 to 70 mph range.
Ignoring warnings
Studies show that the tendency to ignore warnings about life-threatening weather stem from a couple factors.
People who have ridden out storms before might feel complacent, said a study from the University of Buffalo.
And previous warnings that didn’t come to fruition can result in apathy.
When government agencies surveyed disaster survivors, they found people didn’t grasp the danger they were in.
Sister Robin Merrill was one of the people who did take shelter.
She was at the First Presbyterian Church off the New River, closing down her eponymous weekend street market, which gives away vegetables from local farms, when the heavens took a dark turn.
“Right before the tornado warning hit our phones, we had noticed a huge change in the weather,” she said. “The clouds got really low on us. … That’s when we knew, this is weird. … So we had gotten everything into the church.”
She and her friend stayed inside once the warning came. “We took it very seriously because we could feel it,” she said. “We were already feeling a strange tinge in the atmosphere — for at least 10 minutes before that, the weather was bizarre.”
She and her co-worker had zero desire to leave the church. “We just waited it out where we were.”
What triggers a phone warning?
The blaring tornado warning that people received on their phones was part of the The Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system, Carr said.
“That only gets triggered with certain phenomena,” he said. “One is a tornado. Others would be severe thunderstorms with winds over 80 mph, or baseball-size hail.”
Also included are hurricane warnings, storm-surge warnings, and emergency flash flood warnings, such as one triggered by the 26 inches of rain that fell on Fort Lauderdale in April of 2023.
Saturday’s tornado warning had a one-minute lead time, which is not unusual for Florida.
Carr said that in the Great Plains, where tornadoes are more common, storms have such large forces creating them that forecasters there can sometimes give a warning with a 15-minute lead time.
Tornados in Florida tend to be shorter-lived and spin up more quickly, so lead times are shorter, he said.
Sometimes, with very weak tornadoes that don’t generate much of a radar signal, they touch down before there’s a warning. “We try to avoid that,” he said.
More twisters ahead?
The National Weather Service has called for more tornadoes than usual this winter and spring because of El Niño.
There are two factors at work, Carr said.
El Niño winters tend to have stronger upper-level winds over South Florida because the subtropical jet stream is farther south.
Those winds are key to the eventual formation of tornadoes. ”We tend to have a greater potential, with these more organized squall lines or cells … El Niño does contribute to that because it increases the winds over the area,” Carr said.
Secondly, the winter storm track, which in a neutral year would have storms moving from west to each across Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, has pushed farther south, over central and southern Florida.
The end result is a greater likelihood of tornadoes this winter in South Florida.
Sister Merrill said she’s aware of the El Niño effect. “I’m going to take that super seriously about where I am and what I’m doing,” she said.
Staff writer David Schutz contributed to this news article.