Safeguards are put into place

Bertha Yoder - June 17, 2008

The Louisiana City Council heard a report from Fire Chief Mike Lesley regarding the recent storms and failure of the city's siren warning system.

Lesley said numerous hours had been spent trying to determine why the city's warning sirens did not sound during the tornado warnings Tuesday night, May 26. Two tornados passed by the city, one to the south and one to the north, and the sirens would not sound despite multiple attempts.

"They were predicting the one to the north was actually going to hit Louisiana. We tried half a dozen times minimum to try to get them to go off," Lesley said.

Two companies, the one that installed the system and another, were called in to check the sirens, but neither had an answer.

Several weather spotters are used when there is potential for tornados, as well as local forecasts and news from other communities, and there was no doubt that the community should have been warned on the night of the storms.

Lesley said it is policy that anytime Louisiana is listed in a warning, the sirens are set off. The council recently spent approximately $17,000 to get a system to help protect its citizens. However, for some reason that cannot be determined, they did not work when needed.

To help prevent this situation from happening again, several back-ups were instituted.

The chief and assistant chief will be capable of setting off the sirens from their radios. If the main tower is out of commission, there also will be a way to set off the sirens manually from locked boxes on each pole. The cost of the lock boxes totalled approximately $2,500. The city council also approved a new computer and high-speed Internet service for the firehouse that will allow them to do Groupcast calling as a further back-up. This communitywide telephone calling system allows 1,700 households to be notified within three minutes of time.

Lesley said they are lucky nothing happened, but the result will be a better system that will have several back-ups to make sure this situation doesn't happen again.