Tornado sirens sparse in small, rural communities

Tornado sirens sparse in small, rural communities

MARBLE HILL, Mo. — Erin Ward said KFVS12’s meteorologists did a great job keeping people updated on the severe weather moving into Southeast Missouri. That is, until her power went out.

It was then that Ward, and perhaps many of her neighbors, lost connection to dire information.

Ward lives just outside Glen Allen, Missouri, where a tornado destroyed houses and took lives early April 5. When the power went out, so did the Wi-Fi. And cell tower signals are spotty in the rural area, she said. Without Wi-Fi, her phone was useless. With the power out, she and others had no warning a tornado was imminent.

Had the area been equipped with tornado sirens, she said, it might have made a difference.

“They would be very beneficial,” Ward said. “They could have spared five people’s lives.”

Ward stood in line Wednesday, April 12, waiting to talk to recovery service providers at an organized Multi-Agency Resource Center disaster assistance meeting in Marble Hill. Standing in line to Ward’s right was a woman who lost a grandchild to the tornado. The tearful grandmother nodded her head in agreement with Ward’s assessment, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. She said she believes her grandchild might be alive today had there been a siren to give a warning.

Emergency management leaders say tornado sirens are not designed to penetrate buildings and warn those inside of an impending twister. They’re designed to warn people outdoors to take shelter.

Still, many people do hear the sirens’ wails during testing and warnings from inside their homes or offices. Ward, for example, works in Marble Hill, where she can hear the sirens from her office when they are tested.

There were no sirens in place to warn people in Glen Allen, where, in the middle of the night, five died in a twister that ripped apart parts of the town and Grassy, a few miles outside of Marble Hill. In addition to the five deaths, there were five injuries; 87 structures were damaged and 12 were destroyed. The Bollinger County communities of Glen Allen, Grassy and Scopus are not eligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency recovery funds because the total damage estimate in dollars does not rise to the threshold needed to qualify.

Likewise, sparse population and resources play a big role why those communities do not have tornado sirens. The village is one of several small communities within the Southeast Missourian coverage area with no siren infrastructure.

More densely populated areas such as Cape Girardeau, Jackson and even small towns such as Marble Hill typically have multiple sirens. But unincorporated towns with populations of hundreds, oftentimes are left out.

Funding

The reasons mostly have to do with funding, but the process is complicated by a snare of overlapping jurisdictions. Locally, there may be priority disagreements between local fire and rescue districts and county government officials, for example. Sometimes those disagreements lead to disjointed systems that don’t talk to each other or that don’t maximize capabilities. In other examples, funding applications may require matching grants, which may not be available locally. Those grants might also come with requirements from outside agencies such as the Department of Natural Resources or even historic preservationists, emergency managers said. Other agencies, such as Homeland Security, offer grant funding for emergency systems.

Ultimately, county governments are typically responsible for putting up storm sirens in unincorporated communities. County governments fund emergency management departments and personnel. But that doesn’t mean other jurisdictions don’t, or can’t, pay for and install sirens on their own.

For these reasons and more, many pockets of people in rural Southeast Missouri are not within earshot of tornado sirens. These areas are also the least likely to have reliable cellphone signals to keep up with alerts.

The sirens can cost $30,000 or more apiece, with ongoing costs for maintenance and testing.

In Bollinger County, areas such as Leopold, Zalma and Patton (all areas that support schools) have no sirens. In Scott County, there are no warning sirens in New Hamburg, Commerce, Kelso or Haywood City, according to interim emergency management director Tom Beardslee. In Perry County, there are sirens in Perryville, Altenburg and Frohna, but none in places such as Brewer and Brazeau.

“Those things are not cheap,” Perry County emergency management coordinator Tom Grayson said. “And the grants can take two to three years.”

Warning systems

Sirens may not be considered as important as they once were, at least to the majority of the population. Officials say residents should sign up for warning alerts that will override a phone’s mute settings. They say phone alerts are a more reliable alert option than sirens.

Still, sirens can be an effective overlap if a person has turned off his or her phone, or doesn’t have access to internet or cellphone service.

Bollinger County’s part-time emergency management coordinator, Kevin S. Cooper, said he wrote a grant proposal in recent years in an attempt to bring better warning systems to the county, but the county did not get the grant. He said he’s currently writing another such grant proposal.

Cooper said he wants to see a two-pronged warning system in Bollinger County, both a message service and more sirens. He said currently Marble Hill has two sirens and there is another one in the Sedgewickville area that was supported by the local fire department.

He said he wants to see sirens erected in Patton, Scopus, Leopold and Zalma. Officials also have noted that thousands of people can crowd the Castor River campground on holiday weekends. That area has no siren, and spotty cellphone reliability. Hundreds or thousands of vulnerable campers could die if a tornado hit the area during camping season.

The messaging service, he said, ties in with other networks supported by the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Several counties in Southeast Missouri already employ such systems. In addition to texts, the alert system can also send emails and make phone calls to landline phones, if people still have them.

“I’m not saying people wouldn’t have perished (in the recent tornado),” Cooper said, “but they would have had a lot better chance with a better system. So I’d like to have both systems.”

Sirens in Bollinger County

On the night of the tornado, the two sirens in Marble Hill weren’t working properly. Unable to turn them on remotely, assistant emergency management director Calvin Troxell had to trigger them manually, racing in his truck to do so just ahead of the storm. Cooper said that issue has been resolved and the sirens are back in working order. Troxell told the Bollinger County commissioners Monday, April 10, he would not stop pushing county and state authorities.

“I’m calling for eight new sirens for the county,” Troxell told the commissioners. “We have to make changes. In today’s society, there is no excuse for those people not to have been warned.”

U.S. Rep. Jason Smith listened to the concerns raised by local officials at a meeting Tuesday, April 11. He said the input was helpful, but he could offer no promises. One of the big problems he noted was the lack of cellphone service.

“Some of my colleagues that I work with, when they are like, ‘We need 5G,’ I’m like, ‘We just need a G,’” Smith said, drawing a chuckle. “Cellphone access is something I’m pushing really hard for for our district.”

He asked for the community’s leaders to stay in touch with his office “and see how we can be most responsive.”

Alert backups

FEMA officials push the idea of having multiple ways to be alerted of storms. In addition to signing up for cellphone alerts, officials also recommend purchasing NOAA weather radios, which are battery-operated. Barb Sturner, FEMA external affairs specialist, said newer radios include more technology such as phone apps and emergency alerts. She said tornadoes that spin off during sleeping hours are especially dangerous from an alert perspective. She recommends following weather forecasts, and when storms are possible overnight, to change phone settings so weather alerts will sound. She also recommends making sure phones are charged before sleeping, having a flashlight nearby and to have a plan of where to go if a tornado is imminent.

History of sirens in Cape, Jackson

Long before cellphones became mainstream personal devices, many communities adopted sirens to warn towns of impending tornadoes. The prevalence of warning sirens grew from the civil defense era when the United States was worried about a nuclear attack. Many communities funded and erected the sirens in the 1970s.

In the mid-1990s, the Southeast Missourian reported that residents living north of Perryville heard the sirens and took cover under their steps. The twister ripped the roof off their house — one of 68 homes that were damaged by that tornado, which touched down and carved a path 5 miles north of the Perryville city limits. At the time of the article, published in 1996, Cape Girardeau and Jackson had no sirens.

Today, Cape Girardeau and Jackson are completely covered by sirens; and most of the unincorporated communities are as well. The city of Cape Girardeau has installed 13 sirens within the city; Jackson has put up nine; Southeast Missouri State University has its own system; and another 19 sirens are dotted throughout Cape Girardeau County in places such as Gordonville, Millersville, Fruitland and Oak Ridge.

No central database exists that can locate all public sirens within the state. Missouri’s State Emergency Management Agency could only provide a spreadsheet where SEMA-supported grants were issued to help pay for sirens. The list is a small fraction of the sirens across the state.

Banner Press contributing writer Linda Redeffer and Southeast Missourian reporter Danny Walter contributed to this report.