‘Be ready for anything’: Stone County shares plans for overnight storms

STONE COUNTY, Mo. — Monday night’s storms come one week after an EF-0 tornado touched down in Stone County, taking out trees and causing damage to a home in Union City. Stone county joins other counties in Southwest Missouri in preparing for Monday night’s severe weather risk.

Stone County OEM had a conference call with the National Weather Service Monday afternoon to get a better grasp at what’s expected overnight.

“The whole idea of emergency management is we try to plan for the worst and pray for the best and then deal with what we do get,” Stone County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) Director Tom Martin said.

Martin has seen several different storms over the last decade, each ranging in severity.

“We’ve had [a] tornado in the southern part of Stone County, the one in 2012 that hit Kimberly City and then on over to Branson and through there,” Martin said. “That particular tornado started actually down on table Rock Lake, right on the shoreline.”

It’s weather events like that tornado in 2012 that have helped Martin and his team prepare for storms in Stone County.

“When we start having a possibility of severe weather, I try to reach out to our county commission,” Martin said. “At the same time I try to reach out to our road and bridge departments. Then we also send out a notice to to the fire departments as well.”

Martin said it’s a team effort, which includes help from everyone at the Stone County OEM and those who are on the ground reporting the conditions.

“Most of our people volunteer, so we we try to do the best we can,” Martin said. “We operate as much as we can at night from our residence. We have a few places that have weather spotters. Some of the fire departments do weather scouting around over the county and share information.”

Martin expects to stay up most of the night Monday watching the radar, as he said high winds are expected with a chance of tornadoes.

“We live in an area gets hit with tornadoes,” Roland Morin said. He lives in Branson West. “We originally moved here from Florida. So hurricanes are the real deal there. So, you always got to be prepared for severe weather.”

Morin said he takes severe weather seriously and has a plan for when it moves into town.

“We have extra food, extra water on hand,” Morin said. “We go into our John Deere room that’s set up downstairs. We take our two dogs and that’s where we go.”

Cape Fair resident Marlin Brown said he dodges most weather, but also has a plan when needed.

“We go out in the crawl space,” Brown said. “We’re almost right across the street, a few hundred yards away from the siren. So we hear it very well.”

Martin encourages families to have a weather radio or download a weather app to get the latest information on storms in the region.

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