Tornadoes touch down in Lexington County, Carolina Alert sends no notification
Two tornadoes touched down within a 50-mile radius of Columbia Friday afternoon amid violent thunderstorms that downed trees and soaked students. While Carolina Alert tweeted warnings about the storm, USC’s emergency notification system issued no email or text message warnings about the tornadoes, one of which was rated an EF-2, with winds topping out at 130 mph. The twister winded its way across Pelion, S.C., less than 23 miles from Columbia in neighboring Lexington County.
While the storms were severe, the tornadoes in the area did not directly threaten USC’s Columbia campus, and thus required no warning, according to Cpl. Vinny Bocchino of the Emergency Management Department of USC’s Division of Law Enforcement and Safety.
“Richland County and Lexington County are very large, and some parts are more prone to tornadoes and tornado warnings than the campus is,” Bocchino said. “We only issue tornado warnings that affect the campus.”
While the tornado’s damage was not as severe as the November twister that killed three in York County, the storm did cause some destruction.
“There was some damage from the tornado; a mobile home was destroyed, there were two houses that were destroyed, but thankfully nobody was injured,” said Vicki Graf, a weekend meteorologist at WRDW-TV of Augusta, Ga. “The tornado was about 100 yards wide with a path of about 8 miles. There were several damage reports all across the area and not just from the tornado, but from severe winds as well.”
If a tornado of the same severity had hit closer to campus, the impact could have been significant, according to Graf.
“If this tornado on Friday had moved through Columbia, it could have been more destructive than it was,” Graf said.
Bocchino stated that the Emergency Management Department has designated a perimeter around USC that is used to warn subscribers to Carolina Alert of any type of emergency. The perimeter encompasses the areas around the medical school, facilities at the USC medical park and past Williams-Brice Stadium.
While Richland and Lexington counties both lack tornado siren systems, USC has its own; the cock crow that heard at 12:10 each Friday is its weekly test.
“We’d use those [sirens] in the event of a tornado warning. They would say ‘tornado warning, tornado warning, seek shelter immediately,’ and it would be broadcast across campus,” Bocchino said. “For tornadoes, we would send a little more than our usual warning because that is more of an immediate threat; when [the National Weather Service] issues a tornado warning, that means that a tornado has been sighted or is very likely to occur.”
Procedures detailed on the Carolina Alert website instruct users to seek shelter in an interior hallway in the lower level of a building away from windows and glass doors, but do not identify any specific locations for sanctuary during a storm.
“I don’t think that there are any modular buildings, like mobile homes, on campus, but those are really the only types of places that you wouldn’t want to be located in,” Bocchino said. “Most of our buildings are fixed structures, so you’d want to be in any one of those.”
Procedures are similar in residence halls, though there is no campus-wide policy for extreme weather events and training for resident mentors is not extensive.
“We don’t really get much training for things like tornadoes. It’s something that doesn’t usually occur, and there’s not a universal policy for stuff like that,” said Alex Bren, a second-year international business student and Capstone House RM. “The only emergency procedure we really work on is fire drills.”