The Siren Board

Recently there was a tornado warning in Livingston County, Michigan. The warning went out and the phones and weather radios went off, but not the sirens. It took about 3-5 minutes for the sirens to activate after the warning was issued. Thus my question is, why would it take that period of time to activate the sirens, and is there some sort of system that could automatically activate the system when a tornado warning is issued?

Usually, central dispatch will need to page out police, fire and EMS about the event, so there's at least a minute of two tone. Not only that, but special receivers at police/fire/EMS stations will need to be activated by two tone. Then possibly a full statement from NWS will probably be read by fire dispatch. That would probably be the reason why it takes 5 minutes to activate sirens, which in my opinion is drawn out and dangerous to the public. With sirens on their own frequency like the bigger cities in Michigan, this will be more efficient. Newer systems can automatically activate sirens based on a polygon drawn by the NWS to my knowledge.