Cities removing tornado sirens in favor of texts, media and Internet warnings

[Stephen Levine]

I agree with those who believe it's a bad idea. We can clearly hear sirens in the house here.
False alarms, except for the rogue lightning strike, which happened once in decades in my neighborhood, are issues with the operator, not the equipment.
They now blow sirens here, whenever "severe" criteria is met for a storm. I believe this is a big mistake; we should return to the days when only air raids and tornadoes prompted blowing the siren.
Sirens can help save lives at night.

 

[Joey Ketcham]

I agree with those who believe it's a bad idea. We can clearly hear sirens in the house here.
False alarms, except for the rogue lightning strike, which happened once in decades in my neighborhood, are issues with the operator, not the equipment.
They now blow sirens here, whenever "severe" criteria is met for a storm. I believe this is a big mistake; we should return to the days when only air raids and tornadoes prompted blowing the siren.
Sirens can help save lives at night.

You can clearly hear it in YOUR house. While you hear the sirens sounding in your house, there are hundreds more who never hears it while in their house. When the sirens sound here, I don't hear sh*t. There is a reason for that, THEY ARE INTENDED FOR OUTDOORS ONLY! Truth be told, most people are f**king confused by tornado sirens anyways. The average person hears them going off, then they stop, and sound again and people think that's an all clear and causes confusion. Joplin, MO is the perfect example. People thought the second sounding of the siren was an all clear while a f**king EF5 tornado was ripping through.

Clear up the confusion, get rid of outdated sh*t from the 50's.

 

[Mike Johnston]

Mike - have you asked your mom how much she's willing to pay in taxes for those sirens? THat's where the rub comes in

No, I haven't asked her, but I will next time I talk to her. I doubt her local property tax bill itemizes public expenses down to that level of detail, so I really don't know how much she is paying for siren protection. But, maybe it's $7 or $12 or $20, I don't know. Pittsburg probably has 15,000 or 20,000 residents, correct me if I'm wrong, Joey. But I do know she values her security and her peace of mind. I'm not sure if the sirens are funded by the municipality or Crawford County, but they've likely been in the tax base for 50 or 60 years.

 

[Rob H]

I agree with those who believe it's a bad idea. We can clearly hear sirens in the house here.
False alarms, except for the rogue lightning strike, which happened once in decades in my neighborhood, are issues with the operator, not the equipment.
They now blow sirens here, whenever "severe" criteria is met for a storm. I believe this is a big mistake; we should return to the days when only air raids and tornadoes prompted blowing the siren.
Sirens can help save lives at night.

I can't find the numbers quickly, but there are 80 sirens in Tulsa, OK alone. Let's take a super conservative value like 200 sirens per state in the CONUS. That's a super conservative tally of 9600 sirens in the US (200*48), we'll round up to 10,000 just to make the numbers nice.

New sirens can cost $25,000, used as cheap as $10,000. Maintenance on sirens can cost between $4000-$10,000 a year, depending on make and model.
Sources:
http://www.kcbd.com/story/22451866/amarillo-tornado-sirens-cost-25000-each-is-lubbock-ready
http://www.turnto10.com/story/24908713/pelham-to-phase-out-outdoor-tornado-sirens
http://fox17online.com/2014/05/20/w...has-been-installing-warning-sirens-for-years/

1) That is a lot of money for the small communities in the Great Plains and the Midwest. There are no federal grants that I see, so this is money directly from taxes in many cases. It would be a hard sell for all but the largest communities.

2) No national standards, and the operation of sirens is up to the emergency manager in charge. There are 3007 counties in the US, each one likely having its own emergency management team with its own policies. That's not even accounting for the fact that many small towns operate their own sirens independently of the county. Huge room for operator error or for questionable policies that either miss tornado warnings or overwarn and cause "boy who cried wolf" issues, and it would take a lot of resources and time to attempt to standardize this.

So let's say you somehow convince a bunch of smaller communities with fiscally conservative leanings and minimal tax base to spend the money on sirens. Then assume the federal government gets involved and standardizes siren use for the nation to address those short comings. Now we face:

3) Existing sirens are not enough to warn people, so now we need to spend even more money. They're a holdover from the civil defense era during the Cold War and didn't account for exurban sprawl.
Source: http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-...in-tornado-siren-dead-zones-in-northeast-ohio

4) Great alternatives exist: weather radios are cheap, and everyone has cell phones these days that can receive EAS. My 94 year old grandma has a cell phone. If people "can't afford" a weather radio and live in an area prone to tornadoes, the money not being spent on sirens can subsidize cheap/free weather radios.

Finally, I hate to say this one, but the numbers are there

5) Not many people die from tornadoes - hold on, don't get the pitchforks yet, let me explain. It would be great if we had 0 tornado deaths in a year. I don't want to hear about anyone dying, especially from an unwarned storm. No one should die from tornadoes - we have good enough technology to prevent it. But the cold, hard, unfeeling reality is that for 300+ million people in our country a very, very small percentage of them die from tornadoes.

blah blah, Buzzfeed sucks, some of the numbers aren't accurate, but whatever
http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/20-things-that-kill-more-people-than-sharks-every

I'm not saying the NWS should stop trying to save lives, not in any way shape or form. But diminishing returns are an issue here, and going from 40 deaths a year to 0 deaths a year won't happen from putting a few more sirens up. I'm willing to bet that removing a bunch of sirens wouldn't alter that ~40 number (or whatever it is) significantly. Good thing is I'm not a policy maker that has to be responsible for being wrong on that bet, but many policy makers are making that bet.

In light of all the above, relying on sirens for warning people and preventing deaths doesn't seem very reasonable. It's something we had in place, so we decided to expand use, and we've evolved a need beyond what can be served now.

 

[Joey Ketcham]

Pittsburg probably has 15,000 or 20,000 residents, correct me if I'm wrong, Joey.

20,000 is a good round number of actual residents living in Pittsburg. When college starts, that # jumps because of the temporary residents who move in that are college students.

My problem with tornado sirens is that they're sounded by individuals, too much room for error. For example, several years back during a severe t-storm warning with 60 MPH winds they sounded the sirens. A couple years later a funnel cloud halfway to the ground is going over downtown, not once did the tornado sirens sound even though it was reported. They sound the sirens so often that people, for the most part, ignores them. They tell you nothing. They sound them for severe t-storm warnings, yet they don't sound when a funnel cloud is halfway to the ground. Most of the people I know in Pittsburg take tornado sirens as one big joke because who knows what reasons they're going off for.

With text alerts and everything else, they give specific information that a tone from a siren doesn't give you and never can because whether that siren sounds or not is determined by someone who is able to sound them... and that person doesn't always have the best judgement call. It's bad all around. They sound too often, they sound when there's no reason for them to be going off and it gets to a point people ignore them. This doesn't happen only in Pittsburg, it happens in Joplin and other cities all across the US. It's outdated technology, technology developed in WWII that wasn't even designed for the purpose of being a tornado warning. Everything else in the technology world is constantly being upgraded, but yet we still use tornado sirens developed in WWII. It's a frickin' joke, and a waste of money for taxpayers.

It's an imperfect system that isn't effective, sure it might be effective for 1 or 2 percent of the population who takes notice and action to tornado sirens, but to me that's not worth the cost.

 

[rdale]

My problem with tornado sirens is that they're sounded by individuals

Sounds like you said that wrong Your issue is not with the sirens at all. Sounds like your concern is with their activation policy. A hard-set policy has zero room for error. If it meets one of the three criteria (tornado warning, 75mph+ gusts, or tornado spotted by trained, reliable spotter) then they are sounded. If not, they are not.

It's a frickin' joke, and a waste of money for taxpayers.

They have great applications, especially in outdoor venue or areas where people need advance notice of a coming storm.

Do you know what automated text alert you get for a SVR with 85mph winds on your cellphone? This:

""

Nothing. But you will hear sirens, and for those who need 5-10 minutes to collect the kids, get into the car, and get to safety, those are 5-10 critical minutes.

 

[Nick Smith]

Hamilton County, Ohio has been upgrading their siren system the past three years with federal grant money. This system includes the upgrading of older sirens (some were installed as early as the 1950s) and covering "dead" areas. Some of the existing sirens are not being replaced as they have been installed in the last 15 or so years. I don't have a hard number, but the total for the system is probably around 200. The cost of the upgrade is over $900,000 from what I've gathered.

A map of the system:

 

[TJKLECKNER]

Would it be better to get rid of all the sirens, but mandate that every household own a property setup weather radio? Cities could subsidize the cost of the radios and programming. More radio towers can be built to eliminate dead zones. Large community gatherings and campgrounds would be required to have one active radio on hand and being monitored.

 

[Joey Ketcham]

Would it be better to get rid of all the sirens, but mandate that every household own a property setup weather radio? Cities could subsidize the cost of the radios and programming. More radio towers can be built to eliminate dead zones. Large community gatherings and campgrounds would be required to have one active radio on hand and being monitored.

Cost wise, yes it would be better to require all homes to have a NOAA Weather Radio just as they're required to have a fire alarm.

 

[rdale]

Would it be better to get rid of all the sirens, but mandate that every household own a property setup weather radio? Cities could subsidize the cost of the radios and programming. More radio towers can be built to eliminate dead zones. Large community gatherings and campgrounds would be required to have one active radio on hand and being monitored.

No. That falls on many levels, starting with the cost. And the requirement to hire someone to be at all outdoor venues like parks, etc every day. Plus most will turn off their radio since they still use 1970s technology and so will sound the alert no matter what part of the county the warning is for. People are not avoiding NWR because of the cost ($30).

 

[rdale]

Cost wise, yes it would be better to require all homes to have a NOAA Weather Radio just as they're required to have a fire alarm.

Fire alarm false alarms happen about 1% of the time. NWR false alarms occur 90% of the time. So no.

 

[Mike Johnston]

I finally got a chance to talk with my mom about the sirens. As expected, she has no idea what they cost but thinks taking them down would be an awful idea. I asked her about getting the warnings by a text message and she just laughed. She doesn't text at all and would be concerned about receiving the text at night as well as battery outages. Pittsburg has a number of elderly residents and she thinks text messages wouldn't work very well there.

She is also a little concerned about being in the Springfield warning area - too many false alarms and even a few failures to detect. This feeling is backed up by their questionable performance in the Joplin disaster (read Mike Smith's book When the Sirens Were Silent.)

 

[rdale]

I didn't read Mike's book, but they upgraded their siren system and now use our best practices for sirens so should never be an issue there again.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Sirens can still be heard from cars - and anyone outdoors can hear them from a good distance away. I'm all for the further development and deployment of mobile phone-based alerts, I think that is the future of weather warnings. I'm not so sure most communities are ready to make that jump 100% though.

False alarms and end-user response/complacency to warnings is still the big problem to tackle, whether it be via sirens or phone alerts.

The cost factor seems a little odd to me. Many of the older sirens are very simple devices. It's a motor directly spinning a rotor inside of a cylindrical housing. In theory, it shouldn't be a complicated/expensive device to repair. The only part that could conceivably need replaced is the motor, unless the housing or rotor is physically damaged. That said, I don't know much about what regulations require. Are siren regulations are like those for traffic lights, which in most cases are required by law to be new when they are installed or replaced (the old lights are never re-used, they are shipped off overseas to be used in other countries)? If the regulations are requiring municipalities to buy expensive new systems, then it seems like those regulations need relaxed to allow refurbishment of older systems rather than ditching everything altogether. I'd think swapping out the motors on old sirens would require less labor than removing them.

 

[rdale]

There are no siren regulations. For the old style ones, yes they aren't expensive parts and pieces, but nobody makes the parts and pieces and nobody wants to service them anymore