Ever since an earthquake near Craig, Alaska spawned tsunami warnings that we missed (see Sleeping Through Another Shaker, also Tsunami Watch) I’ve wanted to keep a weather radio set to automatically turn on when emergency broadcast system alerts activate.
This is sound practice for any household, but particularly for those, like us, who live isolated from others. Had a tsunami hit our region, we would never have known it. We would have been killed in our beds.
Unfortunately, radios consume power on standby alert. We can’t keep them plugged into the wall socket, as one might on the grid. We would need to run ours on batteries, which can run down without warning.
I’ve worked to overcome that problem, and recently found an excellent solution: the Eton FRX5 Hand Crank Emergency Weather Radio (paid link).
Eton FRX5 (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).