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Moving to a tornado-prone area? Five questions to ask to help you reduce risk.

Here are five questions to help reduce the risk you and your family may face from tornadoes.

4. What's my plan for responding to a warning?

Well before a storm arrives, know where you are going to go for shelter and how long it takes to get there, if you know your home is unlikely to survive. If you have children, understand the sheltering policies at local schools and how well the schools are set up to serve as shelters for students.

More likely than not, however, your aren't going to lose your home, Carbin notes. It's much more likely that you'll be without electricity for a period.

Be sure to have plenty of canned food in the cupboard, and have at hand bottled water, a small camp stove or other gas-fired stove for cooking, a first-aid kit, and other supplies. Keep important papers in a ready-to-grab file you can snatch on your way out the door if you need to leave in advance of a storm. And be sure to talk through any plan you devise with children, including a communications plan. A tornado could strike while family members are in different locations around town.

With the proliferation of mobile phones, one approach is to use text messages, rather than voice calls. Text messages leave more of a cell network's capacity available for emergency workers, assuming the cell towers remain intact. Simple apps, such as "I am OK!" are specifically designed to send out a short text burst that can be posted to several social media sites as well as sent as a text message to a list of contacts a user designates.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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