Kick-off

What do you think you should do if there is a tornado warning?

Now listen to Rhiannon and McKenzie talking about what to do when there’s a tornado warning if you’re at school, at a store or at home.

Rhiannon:Normally, on a normal day, like, if I were at home uhm, sometimes you’ll hear sirens go off, the-, and they’ll just say at the first of every month uhm, that they’re just practising the drills, make sure ar- the, not the drills, the uhm sirens, to make sure the sirens work. Uhm, so every … time, and every first of the month uhm, the …
McKenzie:– first Tuesday –
Rhiannon:… community, they’ll do that … uhm –
McKenzie:Every first Tuesday of the month.
Rhiannon:Yeah, they’ll … uhm, uh, sound off the sirens just to, like, as a practice, so people know of what they are. And then at school uhm, normally sometimes on those days they’ll do it. But otherwise it’s like a scheduled day they’ll uhm, go on the announcements and they’ll say we’re under … uh, tornado drill as if it were real and then we will … uhm, when they … sound off the siren, we’ll go into our d- … uhm, assigned areas, like … uh, for me, for Yearbook, if I’m in Yearbook class, the l-, the siren will go off and we’ll leave the classroom … uhm, as a group in a single file line … Supposed to be. And then we’ll uhm, go into the cafeteria and sit on the … side walls or … try and just stay in there, that’s one of our safest spot. Wherever you are in the c-, uhm, school, you go to the safest spot there is closest to you. So …
McKenzie:There’ve been multiple times when I’ve heard my friends talk about when they’ve been shopping at Walmart and the sirens go off, or there’s severe warnings and everybody has to stay in the store. And they won’t let anybody leave for their own safety, so they’re just taking up aisles for themselves and they kinda camp out … in the store –
Rhiannon:Yeah.
McKenzie:– until they say they can go. So this is pretty interesting and fun. Uhm … Never happened to me, but I think –
Rhiannon:It happened actually to me, I was at work uhm, and we had a-, really bad storm. It was raining and whatever, and they … the … we have a, like a … a thing that lets us know if there’s any kind of ale-, a notification we nee-, need to know about. So if something like that goes off, it’s our responsibility as a store – for our customers’ safety – to make sure they stay in the store. Some customers can get, like, kind of annoyed, ‘cause they don’t wanna stay … uhm, but we’re, we can’t allow them to leave, ‘cause it’s part of our safety thing. So we’ll have, we have a produce uhm, … cooler, that we’ll go in, otherwise our dairy cooler … uhm, we’ll go in if it’s … uhm, I believe a tornado. Uhm, we never really practice anything for a fire, but if there’s bad weather or something, that’s where we’re supposed to go or make everyone go. Otherwise if it’s not as if-, as severe we’ll stay just kinda in the store, so …
McKenzie:And if you are at home … Uhm, we used to, when we used to stay home together, our mom would text us or call us: “Get down in the basement!” So we’d bring everything, we’d grab food, games, all of our valuables from our rooms, grab everything we could think of … and just camp out in our big shower in the basement until we thought it was time to … go. And we’d just bring like a flashlight upstairs and act like there was something really happening, even though there wasn’t, so … I mean, but it’s all for safety ... I guess. Pretty fun, though.

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Tornado drill

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