How do I learn about severe weather and other emergency alerts?
When severe weather hits, the City of Thornton Office of Emergency Management wants all of our residents, visitors, and employees to be prepared. An important step in preparedness is awareness; awareness of weather conditions, forecasts, weather intensities, and how those will affect your travel, work, school, and daily schedules. The National Weather Service will issue severe weather, tornado, flood and blizzard watches and warnings for Adams County over the radio and via notification to most cell phones. These notifications to Adams County however do not always mean that Thornton is in the threatened area. To get more pinpoint weather notifications there are multiple phone applications (apps) that will send messages directly to your cell phones when severe weather is in your area. These include but are not limited to:
- Channel 9NEWS Weather
- The Weather Channel
- Weather Underground
- NOAA Weather Radar
If driving in your car, tune into 850 KOA AM or KYGO 98.5 FM, both stations provide weather information from the National Weather Service.
Additionally Thornton Emergency Management highly encourages all residents, visitors, and businesses to sign up for our City opt-in emergency notification system, the CodeRED Notification System. This system provides for high-speed mass notification to our residents, visitors, businesses, and employees all at once with landline phone calls, cell phone calls, text messaging, email, and more. The messages are sent via our Thornton 9-1-1 Communication Center and include severe weather warnings, police activity notices, fire emergencies, missing persons, and other critical emergency information for incidents occurring in your area. To sign up please visit, http://gocot.net/CodeRed.
Lastly, sometimes we receive questions of why the City of Thornton does not have a tornado warning siren system. The City, like many of the communities in Colorado, has found that tornado sirens are not an effective way to advise the community of a tornado. There are systems like our CodeRED notification that can provide auditory, visual, and written warnings to better message to our City’s diverse population. For more information on emergency and severe weather preparedness, please visit the Emergency Management webpage (external link).