Enhancing
Survival of Severe Weather Events:
The STAR Program
The lesson learned from previous destructive high winds and tornadoes is sobering: enhanced warning provides people with precious time to find shelter and avoid serious injury or death. Toward that end, the General Assembly appropriated $150,000 in General Revenue Funds to the IEMA for enhanced communications and warning of impending severe weather. Mitigating unnecessary life loss depends upon both early warning and seeking safety in a shelter. The program, Surviving Tornadoes through Awareness and Reaction (STAR), is dedicated to enhancing the means by which the public receives storm warnings and promoting the availability of safe shelter space.
How the Program Works
Cities and counties will compete for grants to permit the wholesale purchase, as grantees of IEMA, of approximately 4,000 tone-alert weather radios to be distributed as a program priority to manufactured housing communities having an emergency plan. The plan should include:
• detailed arrangements for how a storm warning can be disseminated throughout the community,
• an established space in which residents would seek shelter (in or outside the community), and
• a means of providing for the needs of dependent children at home before their parents return from work ("latch-key"kids).
IEMA, through its regional coordinators and in cooperation with local emergency management, will provide technical assistance necessary to assist owners and managers of manufactured housing communities in the development of these plans.
Why manufactured housing communities? Statistics compiled by the Storm Prediction Center of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that 40% of the 735 tornado fatalities from 1985 to 1998 have occurred in mobile homes. When people receive enough warning to go to a pre-established shelter, manufactured housing becomes a safer place to live. Grantees to the program will be prioritized according to the following criteria: 1) previous tornado history within the past 10 years, 2) size of mobile home community being served, and 3) willingness to provide on-site shelter space.
In addition to manufactured housing communities, the program will emphasize other institutions providing for the care of others (i.e.: schools, hospitals, nursing homes, adult and child daycare centers, senior centers, and recreation areas) to ensure that they, also, are equipped with tone-alert receivers to provide for prompt warning.
Units of local government can apply for STAR grants by clicking here.
View a map of the STAR Grant Sites.
