contributed photo Heavy rainfall on highway 330.

Next week is Severe Weather Awareness Week, a week highlighting the importance of preparing for severe weather events.

“Marshall County has experienced several severe weather events in the last couple of years,” Marshall County Emergency Management Coordinator Kim Elder said. “It is important that we all practice our severe weather planning and response in the home and business settings. It only takes a few minutes to review what your family or place of business plans on doing in the event of severe weather, and this helps the reaction time improve for real world events.”

An annual statewide tornado drill takes place on Wednesday of next week beginning at 11 a.m.. Schools, businesses, individuals, and state and local governments are invited to participate.

The regular tornado siren testing will be done at the same time on Wednesday of next week, as opposed to the normal time on Tuesday.

Elder said some people do no not know what a tornado siren is used for or what a tornado is. She said after the tornado and derecho, she took a lot of questions from citizens asking what the siren they heard was.

“It’s hard for us in the midwest to imagine somewhere without tornadoes,” Elder said. “We did a lot of education prior to the tornado and the derecho, but we did even more after.”

She said one thing she wants people to know Severe Weather Awareness Week is there are only three instances in which the tornado siren is used.

One instance is the required weekly test, and the other two instances are an official tornado warning from the National Weather Service or a sighting from a trained tornado spotter. She said sometimes they will take a citizen’s word if the citizen is absolutely sure about seeing a tornado, but they will always send a trained tornado spotter out to make sure.

Elder also recommends signing up for Alert Iowa, a free statewide mass notification and emergency messaging system.

“We all like to think we’re not vulnerable and it won’t happen here, so they forget to plan, they forget to do their drills and they forget to be safe,” Elder said. “We just need to make sure we stay vigilant with our planning and our safety.”