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Wichita — Despite years of pleas by the National Weather Service and only 10 months since the biggest tornado outbreak in history, weather radios still haven't caught on in Tornado Alley.

Surveys consistently show that only about 4 percent of those questioned have a weather radio set to receive weather watches and warnings from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"The people have pretty well voted with their pocketbooks," said Mike Smith, founder and chief executive of Weather Data, a private forecasting service based in Wichita. "People don't like NOAA weather radio."

Marti Holton of Haysville was counted among those who shunned the radio until she found herself cowering beneath a desk as a tornado blew her home away on May 3, 1999.

"You have to go through it to know what can go on," said Holton, who now has a weather radio. "It's a pretty scary ordeal."

Early weather radios that were offered to the public couldn't be programmed for specific areas, and users got tired of being awakened in the middle of the night by a bulletin for somewhere in a different area code.

"They were a pain," said Martin Libhart, chief operating officer for the Wichita school district. "You heard every warning for Ford County, Kansas, in Wichita, Kansas."

Newer radios can be programmed to set off an alarm only for certain types of bulletins in selected areas. Regardless, people still aren't buying them.

"They want the siren to wake 'em up in the middle of the night, and they want the TV for details," Smith said.

But tornado sirens aren't meant to warn people who are indoors, said Randy Duncan, director of Sedgwick County Emergency Management.

Far more sirens, at about $16,000 apiece, would be necessary to get them close enough in any given location to be heard indoors, he said.

The Wichita school district has more than 70 weather radios in schools, placed in offices and corridors where they can be readily heard. They are programmed to sound an alert any time severe weather approaches Wichita.

"With buildings that are closed up and air-conditioned and there's 1,500 kids and it happens to be between classes and teachers are monitoring the hallways, I guarantee most people aren't going to hear the tornado siren," Libhart said. "But people in the office are going to hear that weather radio."

Radios that can be programmed for a specific area cost $50 or more, depending on the features.

"I still think NOAA weather radios are a very valuable tool to have around the house," said Dan McCarthy, warning coordination meteorologist for NOAA's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

"They keep you very well protected and very well informed."