The Siren Board

jkvernon wrote:Some pricey smoke too. $1,200 per year per siren in Franklin County (on average). They're good for what they are, but that's still too much.

Currently on their website, it says they have 172 sirens. That means they would be spending about $206,400 per year to maintain a siren system this big.

I imagine that the fact that we have a bunch of older Whelens in our system that it makes it more expensive to maintain and raises the average spent per siren per year.

Whelen didn't tell the Columbus EMA, that the sirens require 20+ minute cool down period between soundings until feb/march of this year.

Also, The current policy of the EMA is to sacrifice the sirens if need be, to keep the public warned of dangerous storms.

What do you mean by sacrificing the sirens?

SirenMadness wrote:What do you mean by sacrificing the sirens?

I take it to mean, they will sound the sirens again, before the 20 minute cool down period is up.
If a second super-cell storm threatens the same area again.

As far as I've known, the protocol for Franklin County has always been 3 minutes on and 7 minutes off. In the past, the PA function was used in all 4 directions during the 7 minute pause but that's been eliminated. The county ran into problems on August 25th of 2007 when they literally ran the sirens with maybe a 10 second pause between cycles for the entire warning. I'd be interested to see what the new protocol is.

Also, what's interesting is that Whelen doesn't make any mention of a cool down period in any of their siren manuals.

Edit: I'm thinking they haven't yet changed the programming in their system. They basically hit a key and it runs a full tornado warning protocol until it gets cancelled (3 on 7 off). A few weeks ago, that key was accidently hit and instead of the normal Wednesday test, it ran 3 on and 7 off 3 times before it was cancelled.

I was downtown this weds for jury duty, an got to hear the weekly test from there.
I seemed like the test was 1 minute on, 1 minute off, 1 minute on again..

It was over so fast, i couldn't track down where the sound was coming from.

An there is only 2 sirens in the downtown area.

Which 2 are you thinking of? I know of three that surround the actual downtown. There's the one at Veterans Memorial on Broad St., one at Columbus State CC at Spring St. and Cleveland Ave. and there's one at the fire station at Fulton St. and Lazelle St. They seem to have decent coverage downtown. I was in the Arena District a few weeks ago during the noon test and I could hear the one at Vets Memorial loud and clear from there. I kinda wish they at least did a full 3 minute alert test more than once a year.

I was going by the Whelen siren location's map that the Columbus EMA put out.

They don't have the firehouse one listed/spotted on the map.


Checking the old Thunderbolt location map, the firehouse is listed.
Does the firehouse still have a thunderbolt located there?

I went looking for the siren at the fire station today.

An there is a whelen WPS-4008 there.
don't know why it is not listed on the Whelen map.