School Board approves purchase of lightning detector
Students, teams and children playing in or around Pittsburg schools will soon be a little safer thanks to the Pittsburg Independent School District Board of Trustees.
The board approved the purchase of a lightning detector at its meeting on Sept. 21. The Thor Guard system boasts the ability to continuously monitors atmospheric electrical activity in a 15-mile radius, it can be set to predict lightning in a half mile to two and a half mile radius around a location, can be set to manual or automatic mode and features a fully customizable horn cluster hours of operation.
“The new lightning detector system is one more tool in our arsenal to help keep our students safe,” said PISD Superintendent Judy Pollan. “We have so many outdoor sports going on in the spring especially. With this new system, the horn should be loud enough to alert all of our student groups at the same time when lightning is getting close enough to be dangerous.”
Mrs. Pollan said this will also be helpful to students out on fields during recess.
“I especially want to thank PISD’s athletic trainer, Randal MacKenzie, for his research and presentation to our PISD Board of Trustees,” Mrs. Pollan said. “We are so blessed to have him because he is so deeply concerned about protecting our students.”
Mr. McKenzie said this system is superior to many others simply because it predicts lightning strikes as opposed to warning the public after they’ve already happened.
“Say you have a storm building right on top of you and not one moving in – if you’re at a place where you’re the first strike, other systems aren’t going to pick that up,” he said. “This system collects data and monitors static electricity in the air.”
If the system predicts favorable conditions for a lightning strike, an alarm will sound. There will be signage placed in public areas around the alarms for the public to know what the alarms mean.
“The warning gives us a chance to clear the fields,” Mr. McKenzie said. “With athletics, I can kind of keep tabs, but I don’t always know who’s outside with the school or the band or the community that needs to be warned about this.”
Severe weather is a fact of life in East Texas, particularly in the spring. Mr. McKenzie said it’s been clear that the football scoreboard has been struck by lightning on two separate occasions.
The City of Pittsburg and Camp County will be asked to partner with the school because the system will benefit parks near schools, such as Fair Park, which also features the city’s new Splash Park. Each entity would have to vote on the partnership. The system could cost approximately $20,000-$25,000, a cost that will be reduced for each entity.
“When you’re talking about the safety of kids, you can’t just guess,” Mr. McKenzie said. “To me, financially, there’s no value on that. That’s priceless. You do whatever you can possibly do to protect them. And this protects everybody.”
The warning system employs lights as well as sound. Once an alarm sounds, a light remains flashing until the all clear is sounded signaling that conditions are once again safe.
The system is expandable and horns could be placed in a large area across Pittsburg and Camp County.
By Tori Lyle, news@campcountynow.com -
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