Almost a month ago, we had the tornado siren go off here. I was on the phone at the time and didn’t hear it. Even after Bad Pants got me off the phone, I still couldn’t hear the siren. Not from inside the closet next to the brick fireplace, the safest place in the house, nor outside the closet in our bedroom. I’m not sure I could have heard it if I was standing outside, as the tone seems to be right under my hearing register when the sound travels any distance.
This has caused some consternation for us. How am I to hear a weather emergency like that? It’s not like our area uses air raid sirens, which I can here. Instead, this is the siren they use, which I can’t hear from the 4 miles away we are from it.
That is what our siren sounds like. Annoying when I’m listening to it on Youtube, impossible for me to hear in real life.
Most of the time, Bad Pants is home to alert me. Or Dude. But there are times that perhaps one or both won’t be around, or will be using earbuds or headphones and not hear the warning.
I have plans to teach Barrow to alert me to this specific sound once he gets older. Only, I have to figure out how to teach him to do that. If I can puzzle that out, I can teach Roxanne NOW.
Eventually, we want to get a couple of these:
But, as you can imagine, they are not exactly inexpensive. And I’d need more than one for our home. And I need the vibrator as we have lightening often enough that the strobe light you can get to go with it might not be enough to wake me. Though, ideally, one of these with a loud alarm noise should do the trick to get my attention.
Of course, we’re still researching these units. Some are pre-programmed for your area at the manufacturer’s, which is nice. Apparently this particular model is not.
In the mean time though, I’ve found a couple text and email notification websites. They’re free, as long as you use only one location. I signed up to use this one and this one. I’d like to compare the services before I shell out money for multiple locations monthly (we live on the border of 3 counties). However, the drawback here is that my cell phone doesn’t always have signal during thunderstorms.
We are actively researching, plotting and planning for tornadoes. And preparing for a future that might become quieter for me some day.
Adventures of Life 
I can so sympathize with you on the hearing thing. Ever since I was sick in February my left ear has been stopped up – like after flying when you can’t “pop” your ear. I’ve told everyone that I can’t hear well out of that ear and yet they persist in mumbling! I’ve been trying several things to see if this will resolve itself but I think the flight to Kodiak on the 15th is what will solve the problem.
If not the plane, maybe chewing gum or an ear cleaning kit would help?
As far as teaching Barrow to alert, I would teach him to “find” you first. Just like in tracking. Do it now while he is little. Then you can introduce the siren as the signal to find you. Or any other thing that you want him to alert you to.
I trained a service dog for my brother who was a paraplegic. Andy was an awesome dog that really helped my brother after he came home from the hospital. Andy knew to get the newspaper and the mail, turn on and off the lights, open the garage door, get the remote when mom left it where Dennis couldn’t get it, and to get mom when Dennis needed her. He was a chocolate Lab that I trained in 1984 before there was any kind of service dog organization. It’s amazing what the dogs can be trained to do.
PS – Box heading your way Mon/Tues. Something for Mrs. Mom that I will need you to send on to her.
Yay! Resource! Barrow always comes to find and “pounce” me any time he escapes the leash, the pasture, his crate, the kids, etc. I’ll need him to alert to a knock at the door and my cell phone too, eventually.
Rox alerts, sort of. She just gets in my face and gets really annoying when she needs something or something is up. And she has a supersonic whine that can wake the dead. Soft, high pitched and annoying. But teaching her to alert me to the phone has been a puzzling challenge. Her barking at a knock on the door has been so very, very helpful.
I can forward on a box to Mrs. Mom! No problem! I need to send her some stuff anyways.
The dogs need to be trained to an action for a sound – just like clicker training. They don’t know English they just know a certain word or sound. I showed a GSD from Germany. His owner and I eventually got him to “speak” English but the first few weeks were funny. All I remember is plotz means down.
Another dog I trained was taught to get on his bed when the doorbell rang. He had a terrible habit of jumping up on people and being obnoxious when someone came in the house. His owner was a little old lady who just couldn’t control him. I had one of her grandkids stand outside and ring the doorbell, count to 50 then ring it again. Every time the doorbell rang I dragged the dog to his blanket that was in the corner, gave him a treat and told him to stay. Then I released him. Lather, rinse, repeat every time the door bell rang. It took about a week to get him reliable and I only had to do a tune up once or twice.
You can do the same thing with the knock on the door, the house phone, or the cell phone. Sometimes the most difficult thing is to find a patient assistant willing to do the same thing 100 times.
Keep me posted. After 30 years of training lots of dogs to do lots of things I’ve usually got a solution.
That is pretty bad. I have some hearing loss due to working around airplanes for over 20 years. I’m thinking that Imight have to get a hearing aid, but I can hear a loud siren from 4 miles away. Just not talking. You need to move back to AK where there are no weather alerts like that. Just earthquakes.
Aunt Krissy, it’s not nearly that loud at a distance though. I can hear trains go by. I can hear noise from the freeway. It’s just that my brain doesn’t recognize that sound, at a distance (remember there are things between us and it) as a sound to be processed at all. It’s loud in town, and as the noise spreads out to encounter trees and houses in the way, it gets quieter.
Johnny Reb has a NOAA Weather Radio thingy— the alert mode on that can Wake. The. Dead. (Dear Husband can hear it w/o his hearing aid in.) Want me to check and see what info I can dig up on make/ model etc?
Yes, please!
Fingers crossed for today for you 😉 Will try to call this evening and see how things went!
xoxoxoxoxo
I will call and let you know! There are a couple other potentials out there too we’ll be asking about. I’ll fill you in more later.
One night when Abby was 5 months old heavy static on the baby monitor woke me in the middle of the night. My car was parked on the street b/c we had had the driveway sealed the day before. I turned on the weather to see if there were any reports of hail. The weatherman was reporting a tornado warning. Sirens were not going off.
I moved my car in the garage and then debated if I should risk waking a sleeping baby by moving her (stupid, stupid, stupid). As I was thinking about it, I heard things starting to hit the house. I sounded like a train was going past. I ran to the nursery and moved sleeping Abby to the hallway with me. The wind died down…I looked out the front window and it looked like a WWII scene with all the lightning.
Several hours later, I learned that a tornado had gone through the cornfield behind our house…a tenth of a mile away. The things hitting the house had been corn cobs. There was trailer skirting in my back yard from the mobile home park that was several miles away…the mobile home park where my grandparents lived and nearly died when my grandfather was thrown from their home and my grandmother was stuck under it. 25 people died from the tornado. It was a nightmarish week after.
Tornadoes are a big concern to me. As are weather sirens. So yes to those radios for you. And to training Barrow to hear the sirens on your behalf.
We had a HUGE funnel cloud go over our second house in Oregon, directly overhead, a couple years ago. I managed to close all the windows but the ones upstairs and Dude’s room became very wet. We spent a few hours in the laundry room. Luckily, I had the tv on during the day back then. Now, not so much. It distracts Dude from school.
Here, a closet that only fits two adults and one child just doesn’t quite cut the mustard. What if the girls are with us? What about my dogs? I’m not going to let my expensive puppy get whisked away! Or Rox! It caused me A LOT of concern. Luckily, the tornado was about 7 miles away, on the other side of the tornado siren. But still, I was a bit freaked!
I am very, very glad you and Abby came through unscathed. Shaken, but unscathed.
That tornado stuff is scary for a gal out in the middle of a huge field on a horse. I watch for storms (I can see them coming for a long ways) and if there is any lightening I run for the horse trailer but I can’t imagine where to go to be safe where I live out on the flat. We do have tornados (I think more than there used to be) but maybe not so big or the country has so few building and such that nothing much gets damaged.
If you’re out on the flat, lie flat on the ground in a shallow spot, a dip or a ditch. Tornadoes manage to pick you up because of the air space UNDER you. So being low is good!
I soooooooooooooooooo hate tornados. Especially when I first moved to nebraska with eric we had lots of them very close and our siren was the same as the fire siren talk about confusing you never knew if it was a fire or a tornado warning. But we did invest in the radio you had pictured but ours was not expensive. I believe we got it at walmart for like $15. It is well worth the 15:) It did help and it is very very loud and anoying so it woke me up well. Hope you get it all figured out:)
There HAS to be less expensive alternatives! Hope some of the suggestions ppl posted here help. And I think if Barrow or Rox could help you that would be best, then even if you’re not home if you have one of them with you you still have your alert system.
Dang that’s scary, about the only real “weather” concerns we get here are blizzards and tornados/thunderstorms. Last summer we actually had a couple weeks with quite a few tornado watches and warnings… usually we don’t really get them. One was even for our exact area and the weather was pretty intense. I got all the dogs, the indoor cats and myself in the basement. Had the horses in the pasture (figured it would have to be safer than the barn or corrals). The hardest part was convincing Mack that he HAD to come into the basement (my mom’s St Bernard, I was dog-sitting him and her mini daschund)
We had no damage here but friend’s of mine that live about 20 minutes away got 3 big cracks in their basement from the house being moved on its foundation plus trees in their yard and outbuildings being damaged. 😦
Scary! The barn I used to board the VTA at in Oregon had a tornado go through it last fall. We’ve had a HUGE funnel cloud go over one of our rentals in Oregon too. As it is, we’re under tornado watch tonight. We won’t be going to bed until it clears, around 1 a.m. my time.
Leaving the horses OUT if tornadoes threaten is the BEST option. A good thing to do is have grooming collars and tags with phone numbers on them for just in case. Or, spray paint your phone number on them. I will be getting the grooming collars and tags for mine at some point this spring, when finances free up a bit.
We hear a tornado came through about a decade ago, leaving only our house standing with a bit of roof damage. It took out the neighbor’s house and you can still see it’s path down the street from us in the woods, where trees were left twisted, torn and lying about.
It would be really neat if you could teach your doggie to alert you to that. Could you email someone at one of the service dog training facilities? Surely there are not so secretive that they wouldn’t share how they would train for that? At least I would hope.
It’s less about being secretive, and more about wanting you to come to their facility or buy their dog instead, which is expensive.
What about a hearing aid? Do they make one for different frequency loses? I didn’t read everyone’s comments so sorry if you already had to answer that, I was just thinking…
I don’t have an actual hearing loss. Instead, my brain just doesn’t process some sounds well. It’s either hereditary, which I suspect, or damage from a concussion or two. The audiologist made it clear last year that a hearing aid wouldn’t help. 😦