55th tornado siren installed in Daviess County
May 24—With the recent installation of its latest emergency siren off Brook Street near Sorgho, Daviess County Emergency Management Agency now has 55 sirens designed to alert those outdoors during severe weather.
EMA Director Andy Ball said the Brook Street siren is the newest of four sirens installed in the county during the last 15 months.
"We looked at the maps, looked at the county coverage," Ball said. "Looking at our criteria for the number of actual addresses points that it affects and the type of businesses, churches, schools in the area, that is the reason we chose this site as one of our siren locations.
Ball said there are 55 sirens in Daviess County, with 29 of those belonging to the county and 25 belonging to the City of Owensboro. There is also one siren that was privately purchased and is incorporated into the EMA siren system.
Ball said he would like to clarify the expressed purpose of the severe weather sirens.
"These sirens are here to warn people that are doing outdoor activities; they are not designed to be able to warn you if you are inside doing tasks listening to TV," he said. "They are designed for people that are outdoors so it gives them time to get to adequate shelter."
Ball said one of the regular questions he is asked is why Daviess County does not have 100% coverage with its sirens. Coverage currently sits at about 80-81%.
"We are working on that as development occurs, and the county did agree to let me do two sirens a year for a few years and that has been what we are doing now," Ball said.
Ball said the reason the county does not have complete coverage with its sirens is because such a large portion of it is rural.
"I don't expect that we will ever have 100% coverage," he said. "These sirens typically run about $25,000 to $30,000, and just like everything, due to inflation that cost will continue to rise."
Ball said Emergency Management has been in the process of replacing older mechanical sirens, some dating back to the Civil Defense era in the 1970s, with more modern replacements. To date, eight of those have been replaced.
"I have been here for about seven years, and since I have been here we have replaced all of those older sirens with newer sirens," Ball said.
There are currently two different siren alerts being utilized — one that sounds like a human voice issuing a warning for severe weather and also a traditional siren sound.
"The sirens that are closest to the parks or within the parks; those are the ones that have the voice," Ball said. "Those are the only ones that are activated for severe thunderstorm warnings. The rest are only activated for tornado warnings."
While the months of April, May and June are considered peak tornado season in western Kentucky, Ball said he does not advise people to focus on those months, because tornadoes have been recorded in Kentucky in every month of the year.
Rather, local residents should have a plan for a tornado to hit at any time during the day or night.
