Does Latvia have tornadoes?
We woke up this (December) morning to the sound of sirens. Sadly, my first thought was “air-raid siren!” Surely, Russia isn’t attacking the Baltic states… is it? Christina complained briefly about it sounding like midwest tornado alarms and promptly went back to sleep 🙂 Oh, yeah, that seems more reasonable. But wait, does Rīga get tornadoes? I quickly realized that I am naively unaware of, and thereby completely unprepared for, whatever potential disasters (natural or otherwise) I might face as a resident of Latvia.
A quick survey of my surroundings revealed a neighbor casually walking his dog; another taking out the trash; traffic on the streets looked unhurried and orderly. All must be well, because of course, in a real emergency people will do exactly the things necessary to make the situation worse. As it turns out, the Latvian State Fire and Rescue Service tests its civil defense sirens once a year.
Christina was correct in hearing the similarity of this alarm with those of her childhood. It seems (I’m not yet 100% sure) that Latvia is one of the very few countries, along with the USA that still uses the series 2001 sirens from Federal Signal Corporation. There are 164 sirens located throughout Latvia with an audible signal radius of 1.5 km. Math class was a long time ago, but I calculate that this covers about 1,150 square km (444 square miles). Hmm, seems woefully inadequate for a country of 64,500 square km. I’m sure they are strategically located at population centers and not, for example, the middle of lakes and forests, but hey, what do I know, I don’t even know if Rīga has tornadoes.
Had this been a real emergency, my next course of action should have been to turn on Latvijas Radio https://latvijasradio.lsm.lv/lv/lr or TV channels LTV1 and LTV7 https://ltv.lsm.lv/lv to get information about the reason for the alarms, instead of scanning for fear on the faces of my neighbors 🙂
And yes, although very rare, tornadoes do occur in Latvia. High winds however, seem to be a weekly occurrence in the winter.
