UCHRA To Provide Weather Radios Across UC

UCHRA working to provide households across the Upper Cumberland with free weather radios.

Assistant Transportation Director John Brock said the organization recently purchased 1,715 weather radios thanks to a TVA grant. Brock said each radio will come pre-programmed to cover the Upper Cumberland and with backup batteries already installed.

“When weather patterns and systems move through so quickly and they can cause so much devastation, we just want to make sure that folks in the Upper Cumberland has as advanced of a warning as possible,” Brock said. “So if power goes out you’re still going to have that weather radio operating off of battery power to really give you up to up-to-date information.”

Brock said UCHRA’s county offices will distribute the radios to their local communities starting around mid-February. Brock said the goal is to get the radios to the public before tornado season begins in March.

“We know with the tornado back in 2020, it seems so far now, it’s five years ago now, but we want to make sure that we’re never caught in the situation where people are caught off-guard again,” Brick said.

Brock said TVA actually reached out to UCHRA and provided the $50,000 grant financing the radios. Brock said his organization was able to get the radios for a cheap price by buying them directly from a manufacturer.

“We basically looked at the population of each of the counties in the Upper Cumberland and then we put together a little formula to come to a number per county to distribute to each county based on that total, the 1,715 radios,” Brock said.

Brock said anyone interested in getting a weather radio should reach out to their UCHRA county office when the time comes.

“We’re kind of basically setting a rule that, maybe one radio per household,” Brock said, “But they can basically just call or show up at the county offices and request a radio and they can get one free of charge.”