Two tornado siren failures in two years too many

The tornado warning sirens failed to go off when the National Weather Service (NWS) issued a tornado warning for Dubois County early Wednesday morning last week.

A tornado warning is issued when a tornado has actually been sighted or has been picked up on radar. This is the second time in two years the sirens have remained silent during a tornado warning.

The first time occurred on February 28, 2011, when dispatchers at the county communications center didn’t notice the alert from NWS notifying them of the tornado warning. A tornado hit Dubois County, damaging several structures near Duff and then causing extensive damage in Celestine. Luckily, no one was seriously injured during the event.

During the investigation of the Feb. 28 event, the two dispatchers stated they were both on separate emergency calls and didn’t hear or see the alert on the computers despite being aware a tornado warning was likely that night. The two were subsequently suspended without pay for 15 work days for the mistake.

To ensure dispatchers were aware of weather warnings issued by the NWS in the future, the county installed a weather alert on a radio tower near Greener Rd. in Jasper. This tower is the county’s fire repeater tower and when a warning is issued by NWS, the alert sends a signal to the 911 Communications Center on the frequency used by the local fire departments. According to Janice Love, director of the 911 Communications Center, the fire frequency is used because it is the strongest for the county.

The signal causes a red alert message to appear on the dispatchers’ consoles and an audible alarm to sound until the dispatcher acknowledges the alert.

Last week, and several tornadoes later, the counties sirens failed to go off again.

The NWS issued a tornado warning for the eastern portion of the county early Wednesday morning —mainly over Birdseye— at 2:18 a.m. According to Love, she knew of the bad weather that was expected and had added a third person to the night shift to ensure any contingencies could be handled.

She stated the dispatchers did exactly what they should have done when they attempted to activate the sirens within a minute of the warning. In total, the dispatchers attempted to activate the sirens three times and all three times the sirens failed to go off. After the second failure, the dispatchers began notifying fire department personnel by radio. After the third failure, the dispatchers were about to manually activate each siren in the county when the warning was cancelled.

“They did exactly what they were supposed to do,” Love said on Wednesday morning, “but it was an equipment failure of some kind and we are trying to find out what happened right now.”

Later, Love reported a frequency overload had caused the signal to fail being transmitted but she didn’t know what caused the overload.

On Monday, Love informed the County Commissioners that she and the tech from Advanced Communications had determined how the failure occurred. While listening to the recording of the dispatchers during those few moments in which the tornado warning was active, Love and the tech could hear the audible alert sounding in the background as the dispatchers attempted to page the sirens. According to Love, the audible alarm will continue to sound until the dispatcher acknowledges the signal.

She stated they simulated the alert on Friday and were able to create the same failure.

According to Love the weather alert from the Greener Road tower uses the fire frequency and the sirens and emergency notification also use the fire frequency. Until the dispatcher acknowledges the weather alert, the signal continues to broadcast over that frequency effectively stopping the other pages from being made to the sirens.

Commissioner Larry Vollmer told Love he had heard that the frequency interference originally blamed couldn’t have been the problem.

Love invited Vollmer to inspect the communications center and she would show him how it did occur, but Vollmer declined stating he felt an engineer or consultant should be hired to inspect the 911 Communications Center to prevent any further failures in the future.

No further action was taken on the problem at the meeting today and Love stated a new procedure was already in place to alleviate the problem from the frequency overload. “We’ve just never had this occur and no one knew they had to turn off the alert before paging the sirens,” she explained.

Tammy Miller, director of Dubois County Emergency Management, asked Love if the communications center simulated a tornado warning during the siren tests each month, but, according to Love, they only check to see if the sirens are operational each month.

Miller was joined by Vollmer in stating the communications center should start simulating actual events to be better prepared and to find out if anymore “glitches” are in the system.

Vollmer also stated he and the other commissioners would be considering a consultant to examine the communications center in the near future. “I have had several calls about this. The taxpayers have a right to be upset,” he said. “I think if something like this happens again there will be serious consequences.”

Love stated she felt the Dubois County 911 Communications Center was one of the best in the region, if not the state, and acknowledged the dispatchers were going to do everything they could to help anyone that calls in with an emergency. “I can’t guarantee or foresee every possible twist of circumstances,” Love said. “They (dispatchers) had no idea the equipment was going to do this. The manufacturer didn’t even know it would do this.”