Legacy of the 1989 tornado: The birth of Baron Weather and its impact on Huntsville
On a Wednesday afternoon in 1989, I was shoe shopping after school with my mom and two older siblings. As we left the shop in Haysland Square, the sky was green and the clouds were churning. No tornado sirens were sounding, but my mom — who was also raised in Huntsville — knew immediately that it was time to hurry home.
The tornado sirens went off just as we pulled into our driveway in Box Canyon, in southeast Huntsville.
At 4:37 p.m., an F4 tornado touched down and waged a path of destruction along the length of Airport Road, and into Jones Valley.
My dad was driving home from work along Garth, near Jones Valley Elementary, when a van stopped abruptly in front of him. A native Californian, he was unused to storms that you couldn’t simply drive through. The wind shattered the windows of my dad’s Toyota Corolla and he pointed his car towards Barcody, where he stayed at my grandmother’s house for the night.
While my dad made it home safely the next morning; too many Huntsvillians were not so fortunate. When the skies cleared, 21 had died, 463 were injured, and $100 million in damage had been done.
If you lived in Huntsville on November 15, 1989 you have your own memories from that day.
Bob Baron, a local meteorologist and weatherman, looked at the devastation of that infamous day and knew that there had to be a better way to warn people when life-threatening storms are on their way.
Three months later, in February 1990, Baron incorporated Baron Services — which is known today as Baron Weather.
Originally started at his dining room table, Baron Weather now serves 50,000 customers with over 100 products.
Baron spoke to the Huntsville Rotary Club on July 30. He was introduced by Michael Kirkpatrick, President of DESE Research.
“If you use the metric of worldwide market share, Baron Weather would be Huntsville’s most successful entrepreneurial company,” said Kirkpatrick.
In his made-for-radio voice, Baron spoke to the gathered Rotarians about the epiphany he had on November 15, 1989.
“Without warning – any warning at all – we knew we had a tornado on the ground but we didn’t know how big it was, the location, the direction, the speed. What we thought were weather tools ended up being just weather gadgets,” said Baron.
The goal of Baron’s new company was to save lives by detecting severe weather earlier and broadcasting warnings to those in danger.
“In the area of response, the focus has always been to alert only those in harm’s way and alert only when they are in harm’s way,” said Baron. “If you can cut down on false alarms, the public will pay more attention to the things that do actually apply to them.”
Baron Weather has updated its means of information dissemination to match the times; going from pager alerts to mobile apps.
Baron said that when the super outbreak of F4 and F5 tornadoes occurred in Alabama in April 2011, he marveled at how far the technology had advanced since 1989. Baron said there was not a single storm on that April day that local residents had not been warned of. Still, communication was an issue as Alabamians lost power.
As a response to the 2011 tornadoes, Baron Weather donated its SAF-T-Net® app to the State of Alabama.
In 2019, Baron created the Baron Critical Weather Institute to address weather-related challenges across the state.
“Imagine a time when farmers would know exactly where and when temperatures were falling below freezing or a sensor network that could identify hazardous road changes within seconds. What about the ability to monitor every inch of the sky over the state for the smallest, F0 tornado?,” stated Baron.
Each of these scenarios is possible using the technology advanced by the Baron Critical Weather Institute.
The three-fold mission of the Institute is “to provide world-class instrumentation in support of Public Safety, Educational Outreach, and Economic Development.”
Baron Critical Weather Institute has installed a high-tech weather camera in each county in Alabama, in order to begin to create a robust system of information sharing across the state.
The next step is increasing the density of this network. In Huntsville, the County Commission and Huntsville Utilities have partnered with the Institute to bring a dozen cameras to keep their “eyes” on the skies over Madison County.
Baron estimates that there are currently 90 to 95 cameras across the state that provide data to the Critical Weather Institute. This data is used to provide minute-by-minute updates to the Institute’s interactive maps.
The U.S. Space & Rocket Center has given the Baron Critical Weather Institute roughly 2,300 square feet of space to develop a permanent exhibit entitled “How We Know the Weather.”
Baron, who enjoyed speaking to school audiences throughout his career, sees this exhibit as a continuation of his commitment to educate the next generation about the weather.
The highly interactive exhibit is expected to open on October 1. The exhibit will reach the U.S. Space & Rocket Center’s more than 650,000 annual visitors.
The Alabama SAF-T-Net® app is available in the App Store and on Google Play.
The 35 year anniversary of the 1989 tornado will occur this fall, on November 15, 2024.
