March 17-23 is Severe Weather Preparedness Week and RTV6 is Working For You to make sure you and your families are prepared when there’s severe weather. Each day this week, RTV6 will be debunking weather myths and offering tips to keep you safe.
INDIANAPOLIS — When the worst weather hits and tornadoes threaten central Indiana, we rely on tornado sirens to get an early warning to take cover.
The sirens are meant to alert people outside of approaching severe weather, so they have time to get inside and take cover.
There are 170 tornado sirens spread out across Marion County. They're only activated after a Tornado Warning is issued by the National Weather Service or after a public safety official spots a tornado within the county.
Each siren is part of a countywide network and automatic messages are sent between the siren and the servers eight times a day. The messages are to check to make sure the siren is working correctly. If there's an issue, a report is generated each time.
Call 6 Investigates went through thousands of test reports from January 1st to March 14th and we found thousands of reports of communications and battery failures with many of the sirens.
According to the data, between March 1 and March 14:
- 10 sirens needed new batteries
- 38 sirens experienced a communications failure
- 22 failed to activate during an audible or quiet weekly test
- 16 sirens experienced some sort of loss of power (like a power outage)
Those two-way messages are different than the tests that are completed each Friday. On the first Friday of every month, an audible test, where the siren is activated, is performed. On every other Friday of the month, a "quiet test" is completed where the siren is activated, but the siren is much quieter and is completed within a very short period of time.
The sirens throughout Marion County are managed by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's Homeland Security Bureau, we asked them why they've had thousands of reported failures during testing.
"It could be for a variety of issues," IMPD Commander Tom Sellas said. "When you have computer systems there are glitches sometimes on that. The big thing is that is a follow-up."
When a failure report is generated, IMPD works with a local vendor to go out and check the siren and perform repairs, if needed.
When it comes to those battery failure reports, IMPD says that means the backup battery that allows the siren to work during a poewr outage is going bad.
But why did some sirens seem to have constant communication and activation failures?
IMPD says when there is a failure report generated, it's not often specific what exactly what is wrong and that's why they have to wait for the vendor to get out and check the system.
"We'll get out there to make sure they get out there to get it fixed," Sellas said. "This one here failed multiple times, but it doesn't say exactly [what the cause was] other than the fail."
The map below shows the locations of all of the tornado sirens in Marion County.
You can learn more about Severe Weather Preparedness week here.
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