STURGEON BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — A common sound in stormy times is sirens blaring a warning of imminent danger. While many counties locally still do use these sirens to alert you to severe weather, in at least one spot in our area, not only have the sirens gone silent, but the poles don’t even feature the sirens anymore.
The question lingers: Does it make sense to keep this technology up?
Daniel Kane is the Door County Emergency Management Director, in a county in which all the sirens are gone.
“They’ve very costly to not only put up, but to maintain,” says Kane, “These things are tens of thousands of dollars to maintain. When you start looking at where we are in today’s world, do we have enough other means in which to notify people?”
Especially when you look at the true purpose of these storm sirens is actually somewhat limited.
“To notify people outdoors that have no other means of communication or notification possibilities, that something is happening and you need to take action,” Kane reminds us. “They tell us something, but they don’t tell us everything. They tell us something is happening, but I don’t know what, I don’t know when, I don’t know how long.”
So Door County decided the costs were not worth the outdated technology and took a different approach.
“This was more of an educational piece for a lot of folks to say ‘hey, typically in the past we may have relief on these with everything,'” Kane says. “Maybe you only had a tornado siren, that’s the only thing you worried about having. Just know that there are these other options out there.”
And while there were a handful of concerns:
“Some people are just never going to see that side of it — they think they’re that important, and they’ve got a case just as much as anybody else,” Kane remarked.
For only about a dozen inquiries, it became a chance to educate on the other available alert options.
“Pick the ones that make the most sense for you,” suggested Kane, “whether that’s a weather alert app, whether that’s through NOAA weather radio, whether that’s TV, phone, radio.”
In the end, Kane believe that sirens are not necessarily a bad choice, it’s that they may not be considered the best choice.
“The world is becoming more connected in ways that it never has before, so we can rely on these other systems in order to get that,” said Kane.
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