Lawrence EMA wants you to ‘have a plan’ for severe weather

If leaving your home is not an option and you and your family are forced to shelter from a severe weather event in a closet or bathroom, Waldrep offers one potentially lifesaving piece of advice, ‘wear a helmet.’

“If you can’t get out, make sure you’ve got a helmet. A motorcycle helmet with the full facemask is the best but if you don’t have a motorcycle helmet, go out and buy you a bicycle helmet. Blunt force trauma to the head is the number one killer in a tornado,” Waldrep said. 

According to Waldrep, who has served as Director of EMS since 2020, in an emergency situation, access to highly accurate information can be lifesaving, and on March 11, 2025, Lawrence County gained a powerful new ally in its fight for information about severe weather, its own IPAWS system.

The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS, is the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s, or FEMA’s, national system for local alerting that provides authenticated emergency information to the public. 

That emergency information is sent to all smartphone numbers inside a designated area. Before March 11, Lawrence County risked losing valuable time in an emergency by having to use Morgan County’s IPAWS system to warn the public. 

“Now we have an IPAWS system of our own, which is important because we have more going on than just weather. Say we had a derailment in Courtland and there was a major chemical spill. How are people in Courtland or people coming in on (Highway) 20 going to know what’s going on? With this system we can actually draw a circle, a devastation radius, so anybody who might be entering that area will get a text message saying, ‘this is what’s going on, you need to avoid this area,’” Waldrep said. “I hope we never have to use it.”

In addition to its own IPAWS system, Lawrence County EMS recently gained access to another powerful new tool to help it combat the effects of severe weather, a dual-polarization X-band weather radar, courtesy of Climavision.

Climavision, a Louisville, K.Y., based climate technology company, installed its advanced low-level radar system on top of the water tower in Moulton in 2024 as part of its goal to create a nation-wide low-altitude weather radar network to help fill ‘weather gaps’ inside the National Weather Service’s, or NWS’s, aging NEXRAD S-band high-altitude radar system.

The NWS’s closest NEXRAD radars in Huntsville, Birmingham, and Columbus, MS, leave a perfect ‘gap’ in coverage over Lawrence County which Climavision is attempting to close. 

“We got the Climavision radar in Moulton and it’s quite substantial, it carries a good ways out. I’m very excited about that. We’re able to get that data and get people the information they need faster, information is key,” Waldrep said.

As another way of accessing potentially life-saving information, Waldrep recommends everyone with a smartphone download the free Lawrence County Public Safety App.

“I encourage you to get it. It shows everybody where the shelters are. It gives you instant weather updates, watches, warnings, anything like that. It also gives you information about things you can do to try to prepare yourself for the storms that are coming,” Waldrep said. 

Waldrep admits the thing that scares him the most about the threat of severe weather in Lawrence County is apathy. He doesn’t believe people take the threat seriously enough.

“Take the event the other night (March 15). This thing was talked about for a solid week. We saw the destruction that happened in Oklahoma and Texas, and we knew that it was going to be bad and it’s barreling towards us. So, we put all these weather warnings out trying to keep everybody on their toes, and then, nothing happens. Then we get blasted by the keyboard warriors, ‘you guys just cry wolf.’ No. We’re glad nothing happened,” Waldrep said. “I hope we’re wrong every time!”