After severe weather brought damage to the area this year, all the communities across Union County will get updates to their tornado siren alert systems.
Brad Gilbert, director of the county’s Emergency Management Agency, said updates will allow a new software system to be installed at the sheriff’s office for activation. Beyond updating both the hardware and software components, the new system will also allow the sirens to be more targeted to parts of the county that are affected by particular weather warnings.
“Right now, if there’s a warning anywhere in Union County, all the sirens go off,” Gilbert said, noting that the National Weather Service creates a polygon, or shaped designated area, that, even if specified, alerts all sirens regardless of the location. “So if it’s just the bottom half of Union County, we set them off in Richwood and people look at us like we’re crazy. And we get it.”
He said to have a dispatcher manually isolate areas on a map and redirect sirens for that particular place would be a “problematic” process when the dispatch office is already swamped with calls.
“This new software will allow the system that, through the weather service, issues a warning, it will go off automatically. Dispatchers won’t have to do anything. It will select the sirens in that polygon.”
Dispatchers will still be able to manually activate sirens, but this allows the system to be more targeted.
Similarly to the City of Marysville’s system, the sheriff’s office will now be able to test the system silently.
“(The software) also allows the sheriff’s office to do a silent test so if they’re having issues and they want to test it on a Thursday afternoon rather than a Wednesday at noon, they can do that silently,” he said. “That’s a big benefit to be able to keep an eye on the sirens and test them.”
Gilbert worked with the sheriff’s office to get the previous system in place as well, first approaching the commissioners in 2002.
This upgrade will cost the county around $70,000, Gilbert added, which will include that hardware and software as well as new radio systems for the sheriff’s office.
While the county will handle that cost, the sirens will still be owned and maintained by the villages and townships. If there are maintenance issues, townships, villages and cities will handle those costs, he said.
“We found that most of the sirens did not get a yearly maintenance, partially maybe because they didn’t know they owned them or they owned them and just didn’t do it,” Gilbert said. He added the EMA would take on that maintenance to make sure it would get done.
“It’s very inexpensive, about $5,000 a year for all those sirens and we asked to be able to take that on to make sure that it’s done every year,” Gilbert said. “Sirens have a long shelf life if you take care of them so we want to go in, clean them out, clean the birds nests out, check the backup battery, just very simple things that weren’t getting done. Now we’ll know that we have one contractor do that for all those sirens and we’ll be comfortable that they’re taken care of.”
He said in many cases, if a siren doesn’t go off, residents tend to call the sheriff’s office or the EMA anyway, so this will ensure workers are ahead of any issues.
There are almost two-dozen sirens located across the county, nearly a dozen of which are in the City of Marysville, two in Plain City and one each in Richwood, Milford Center, Magnetic Springs, Unionville Center, Raymond and New California.
Gilbert said an additional siren will go up this year at Fairbanks High School, paid for by the Darby Township Trustees.