Officials respond after tornado sirens didn't sound Tuesday night
The sound of tornado sirens. If you were up, you may have heard them going off around 11:30 Thursday morning.
They were being tested after they didn’t go off during a tornado warning Tuesday night. Executive Director Brent Croymans with the St Joseph County 911 Center says it was a glitch that caused that failure.
“That system was moved over here in February and it was slated to be tested today so even though we implemented the system and moved it over here, we’re not able to test it except on the monthly weather test siren I can’t just arbitrarily set off the siren to see if it works,” said Croymans.
Croymans says the weather alerting siren system they have is a backup option to be used when the county’s Emergency Management Agency is not staffed during late hours of the evening. But when he set the siren system to go off Tuesday night...
“The system did not respond,”said Croymans.
Croymans says he and his staff called for help right away to try and get the system working.
“We immediately had service techs dispatched out here and we worked with engineers from Motorola and got the system going,” said Croymans.
But it was too late. The tornado warning had passed.
Folks in St Joseph County weren’t happy after being so unsure of what to do since they didn’t hear the sirens that night, but Croymans says his office has been working diligently with the county’s Emergency Management team to fix any lingering issues.
“During this time obviously we’ve had a lot of communication back with the EMA agency and we actually took the current policies that we have for activating it and sent it back for them to review to make sure that we have the most updated policy and we activate the siren as per their wishes,” said Croymans.
And he says those sirens are sure to sound off next time a tornado warning is issued.
“Now have a tested solution so now we know the system does work from our center which was the purpose of today’s test so going forward from here it should be just like it always has been in the past,” said Croymans.