The City of St. Louis never sounded their 60 some sirens before a EF2/EF3 tore through the richest and poorest parts of the city, killing five. I have no idea if the sirens would have saved those five people's lives. The Emergency Management Commission "gave an ambiguous" directive to push the button so it never happened. (However, it was later determined that they didn't work anyway had the button been pushed).

Anytime serious weather gets near me my two phone and my wife's two phones sound like a Russian nuclear attack is inbound with the noises they make. News people hype up the weather phenomenon days in advance with "weather IMPACT!" It's all over your Facebook feed, the Emergency Broadcast System will interfere with your TV show. Locally, people complain if they are activated too much (false alarms) and people complain if they aren't activated (we never knew it was coming!) When they activate in our town in Iowa, they don't sound them the whole time of the tornado warning, so people think its over when they go off.

I understand the purpose of weather sirens are to get people that are outside oblivious to the sky turning green above them, the atmosphere appearing to turn upside down and the thunder, lightning, rain, and wind commencing to hurriedly go inside. However, I've already been told by my phone, the scanner traffic, Walter Weatherman, and the TV warning minutes before any siren is activated, which relies on receiving the same warning and going through a chain of command for some person to Push The Button.

Its not like Tsunami or Missile warning sirens where you aren't going to know either are coming with much warning. I had friends living in Hawaii when they errantly activated the missile warning sirens there years ago and chaos and confusion ensued.

Are tornado sirens relevant where you live other than telling you to get up, turn on your phone video and hope for some good Youtube footage while it provides the background soundtrack?

I guess that answer is how much faith do you have in the human race. If I hear them I am seeking cover immediately. Other people ignore them at their own risk. My city has them and tests them every month.

Those all in our county with the exception of the one on top of my fire station are set off remotely from our Central Dispatch. the one at my station (which was used when it was installed in the 1950's) has tio be set off manually by someone pushing a button at the station.

That said, there can be a several minute delay before the NWS pushes out the alert which then initiates the response at dispatch.

Not everyone owns or carries a smartphone. Lots of us don’t have TV, and there are no stations that are local anyway. The two local radio stations are without staff after hours, they broadcast a satellite feed. So there’s a few reasons a municipal siren is relevant here.
If the crappy little town of Jerkwater can afford to keep a tornado siren in operation, I see no reason a bigger town shouldn’t. They test ours every couple of weeks. I can hear it in my house with the windows closed.

What Ronin said.

But it is ingrained in me from my yute.
And re-enforced from my military experiences.

I look into weather conditions in advance, monitor weather patterns and keep my head on a swivel when I need to.

Having been caught in the actual effects of 1/2 dozen tornadoes, I can sense if I am out of doors when the weather is "wrong".

Last time I was caught in one was mother's day 2013 in Wichita KS (not having been in Wichita for 30 years, arrived at the airport from Florida and met my sister who flew in from Boston). Saw the cells as the aircraft was on decent in to ICT, so I knew it was "nader juice" conditions.

We just left the airport and was driving to the hotel in a rental, when the storm just got that "feeling", so I drove the tiny Hertz "Chevy Volt" down into a loading dock ramp (where the trailers back down an incline), and was fortunate to be on the "protected side" as a tornado went over. Had hail but it went over the top of the car, and a lot of rocking and fierce wind and rain for about 10 seconds, and then it cleared.

About 30 seconds from the time I "just knew" until it was "clear".

Looked at my sister I had not seen since for 35 years and said. "Welcome back to Wichita!" She laughed. I laughed. The Volt sighed...



I cannot explain how I "just know things", but I obey the voices in my head.

Sometimes the want to kill me, and sometimes they preserve me. (Likely, so they can try to kill me in other twisted ways...)

Just my opinion but I think all warning systems are over used.

I live in a gated community with eighteen an nine hole courses.
We have an old civil defense siren that is used to clear the golfers off the course when lightning is in the area.

I also live a rock throw outside the ten mile ring of Comanche Peak Nuclear plant so there is another system that is tested at noon of the first Monday of the month which I think would also be used for Tornado but have never heard it used for weather even though we have had tornados on the ground destroying homes over the years.

So now we move onto our phones and TV alerts that come from the national weather service that IMO is over used and abused to the point that I have my phones alerts turned off and if I could would probably turn them off on my TV.

I know I know! Some day it will bite me in the ass but I live about 35 miles south west of the DFW metroplex and when any kind of weather pops up the damn tv goes off then if the wifes tv is on hers will go off again several seconds later then my phone goes off then hers will go off all at different times.
Then the storm moves ten miles and everything goes off again and again and again and……
Remember i live SW of DTW metro plex which is a very large area. My brother lives 45 or so miles NE of DFW which is several hours away and I will get alerts for his area.

The system is over used for any type of weather possible so it gets to be a pain in the ass instead of using it for tornados or the possibility of one in my area only. Not for just a chance of severe weather and every time the storm move fifteen miles in one direction or the other.

It will get so bad that just turn the tv off. No control over volume when the alert goes off and on then the minute or longer blasting message.
The tv alert system is also tested weekly at about three in the am and nothing like getting blown out of bed at three am.

Just wish the system was more localized and not so over used for any type of possible weather.

I also have the phones alert for the Amber Alerts for missing people turn off as well. Again it goes off for to large of an area to be effective.

Then ad the other layer of nuclear alert possibilities on top of all that with several type systems involved and it deadens the effectiveness of an emergency situation.

I grew up in a small west Texas town and when the sirens went off you were headed for the celler if you had one.

They recently updated ours and installed new ones all over the county. They put one in about a mile from our house, and we got to use it for real a month or so ago. I was already in the basement working on the water heater, but I could hear it just fine, and my wife and kids heard it and came down to join me.

It's not loud enough to wake us up from a dead sleep, but we can easily hear it in the house, and definitely outside. We didn't get hit by that particular storm, but it damaged a bunch of stuff down the road and a lot of our neighbors lost shingles. I'm glad they put it in...there are far more useless things that they spend money on.

When I was a kid a storm siren was a legit siren. Those suckers were loud as could be. We were’t all that close to the siren but you could hear it with no issue in the house that was all closed up.

Where I live now we don’t have sirens we have this stupid chime and a voice that comes on and says something.
You can barely hear it from 100 feet away. Can’t hear it in my house and I live closer to it than we did as a kid.

Now, the cell phone alerts will wake the dead.

I will agree with whoever said they are over used.
When I was a kid a Tornado watch meant conditions were right for a Tornado.
A Tornado Warning meant there was an actual Tornado.

Now a Tornado warning means that conditions are right.

quote:

The City of St. Louis never sounded their 60 some sirens before a EF2/EF3 tore through the richest and poorest parts of the city, killing five. I have no idea if the sirens would have saved those five people's lives.

Yeah, they are overused so ignored and then when they could be useful they don’t work.

Locally, tested every Wednesday at Noon o'clock.

How else would we know when to run outside to watch?

quote:

Are tornado sirens relevant where you live…g

That depends on how much you believe in Charlie Darwin.
Sometimes people do dumb shit.

The sirens around here aren't loud enough to hear indoors unless they're directly nearby, and certainly not loud enough to wake you up.

So they're really only useful if you're either outdoors or at home with the windows open.

And considering that tornadoes here are typically preceded by rain and strong thunderstorms, often for hours, the chances of somebody being outdoors or having their windows open at that point are slim.

As a slight divergence from my original topic:

When I was a kid they used to sound the sirens in Washington, MO every time the volunteer fire department was called out. One whirl for in-town call and two for out-of-town. Everyone jumped in their pickups and turned on their red dash lights and the town knew to turn on their scanners to listen to the action.

In the 1990s they upgraded to a new Whelen system and the volume was probably 2-3 times as loud and as the town grew the callouts increased and people complained so they stopped activating them other than weather and every Sunday at noon. When they first got them, they tried out each available tone on subsequent months and quickly realized nobody could understand the spoken recording.

Washington no longer has them, but they had gotten Whelen to make some special Westminster tone for them.

The sirens in my area are tested at 1pm the first Saturday of every month. Unfortunately, if the windows are closed, little chance of hearing them.

At night, there is no chance they'll wake me up.

The weather alert on my phone on the other hand, will have me hanging from the ceiling like a cat in a cartoon at 0315, when there is absolutely no weather of any kind within 100 miles, yet it still goes off.

Here it’s a way of life. Bottom of tornado alley of the US. My city tests it every month at noon. Other than noon if I hear that fucker me and the fam are in the bathtub in the center of the house. Thankfully the siren is less than a mile from my house.

California suffers from Prop 65 syndrome: everything can cause cancer so no one pays any attention to the warning signs. If they did they couldn't survive a day.

Amber Alerts: almost always a Dad, sometimes a Mom, has made off with the kid(s) in a custody battle. I can't remember any time when it turned out to be a stranger abduction.

Mind you, I live in a high fire risk zone, so I have Watch Duty app that sends me alerts of any fires in the area. Our neighborhood, most of the houses in it, burned down in 2003 from what was at that time the largest loss of homes in a fire in the US, I believe.

Also we live adjacent to Miramar MCAS, so if the balloon goes up we're just gonners for sure.

Since everyone in my family has a cell phone that is always on, we couldn't miss the warnings if we tried!

Just a shade over 48 hours ago on Tuesday, May 20th, we had an EF2 come through our town headed into Huntsville. The tornado's track was less than a mile north of our house, and that was way too close! The wifey and I were already in our "safe place" when it came through, but the warning had come over our phones probably 10 minutes earlier, and the sirens were maybe 30 seconds after the phones started screaming at us. (For the record, we have two sirens very close to us... one just to the west where the storms normally come from, and one just north of us. They are LOUD inside of our house, and you'd have to be dead to not hear them!)

We didn't immediately run for shelter because I had already been watching two different versions of weather radar for at least an hour, one on TV and the other on my laptop, and knew when it was time to run for it. On the other hand, my daughter is living temporarily with the in-laws about 6 miles north of us, and they never heard any sirens at all. They did get the same warning screaming on their phones though, so were not without notice! However, they didn't have a clue where the tornado was, and the in-laws were still in their dining room working on a jig-saw puzzle and ignoring the warning! My daughter was upstairs with her two kitties, and I had to text her to get her downstairs in time with the cats, and to get her grandparents into the only safe place they have... which is pretty poor at best. If I hadn't texted them, I doubt they would have taken shelter at all!

First Wed of every month they test them here. If I hear them outside of that, I look online or flip on the radio.
I think they are relevant here.

Here in the Yoop, its common to get notifications from places a hundred miles away.