(Decatur County, IN) – Many Decatur County residents were questioning why all of the county’s outdoor tornado sirens blared during early Thursday morning’s severe storms when their area was not under a tornado or severe thunderstorm warning.
County Emergency Management Director Mike Snyder says sirens typically activate when the National Weather Service digitally issues a polygon that indicates where severe storms are heading, and plops it onto the agency’s software.
He says the area covered in the polygon is usually the only place where the siren is activated.
Snyder says, simply put, the system malfunctioned.
“When it did that, that’s okay. We have redundancies in place should that ever happen,” Snyder said. “So, our redundancy factors kicked in, but most of our redundancy factors are actually what we would, in the terminology, we call it an “all call,” which basically sets off all of the sirens in the county.”
Snyder says the activation should have been limited to the Westport area, which was in the polygon (pictured).
“However, since the system failed, in order to get that warning and notification out, we had to utilize our layers of redundancy to engage the system, and that was on an all-call system,” he said.
Snyder adds while the warning system overdid it, he would rather – in the interest of public safety – notify too many people and not enough.
You can read a detailed explanation on how Decatur County tornado sirens function by clicking here.
