Bethel to host meteorologist Charlie Neese

Posted: Friday, April 20, 2012 12:00 am

Bethel University will sponsor a visit from Nashville television meteorologist Charlie Neese at a Tornado Safety Session at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Long Heights Baptist Church in McKenzie.
Neese is partnering with Bethel and Long Heights for TornadoSafe, a live, multimedia tornado safety program.
The presentation is free and open to everyone in McKenzie, Carroll and Weakley counties.
2011 was a record-setting year for severe weather across the U.S. Tragically, 550 people were killed by tornadoes with 32 of those deaths occurring in Tennessee.
Unfortunately, tornadoes have already killed three people in our state this year and the height of the storm season is yet to come.
This active weather pattern has helped spawn more than 30 tornadoes within 50 miles of Carroll County just within the last five years, according to the National Weather Service records. 
 “Despite better warnings than ever before, too many people are being killed by tornadoes,” said Neese. “Joplin, Missouri and Tuscaloosa, Alabama — two cities hit by large tornadoes last year, had high numbers of deaths despite up to 20 minutes warning. Something has to change.
 “We’re entering the peak of the tornado season, and everyone in West Tennessee needs an excellent tornado safety plan. We don’t need another situation like we saw on April 2, 2006, when more than 20 people were killed in Dyer and neighboring Gibson Counties from a tornado that ended up lifting just south of McKenzie. People are dying from tornadoes because they don’t hear the warnings, they ignore them, they don’t know what to do or they don’t have a safe place to go. I address all these issues in the TornadoSafe program.”
Neese, an on-air meteorologist for the CBS affiliate in Nashville, is a two-time Emmy award winner for both his severe weather coverage and for a severe weather safety news series.
He has studied several tornado damage paths, including ones from the record Alabama outbreak last April, in an effort to fully understand how buildings are affected by the extreme wind forces experienced during tornadoes. Neese says he’s on a mission to share the lessons he’s learned through the years about tornado safety.
“When I’m tracking storms on radar and I see one that has the capability of producing a tornado, I always think to myself, ‘Do people underneath this storm know what’s about to happen and do they know what to do?’ That’s my motivation behind TornadoSafe – once you hear the warnings, do you know exactly what to do? In the program, I talk about some things most people probably have never considered when formulating their safety plan and I use amazing tornado pictures and videos to help me make my points.
For more information on TornadoSafe, presented by Bethel University, call Long Heights Baptist Church at (731) 352-2372 or visit Neese’s website at www.CharlieNeese.com.
Published in The WCP 4.19.12