The Siren Board

The Whelen WPS-2806 located about a half-mile from our house went off this morning at 4:38, waking my wife and I up. I immediately got out of bed and turned on the TV in our bedroom to a local news channel, expecting to see the multiple county map in the lower left hand corner of the TV screen with our county colored in red, meaning Tornado Warning, with a scroll moving at the bottom of the screen explaining where the tornadic storm was located. Nope! I checked the radar app on my iPhone and there were no approaching storms to the west. All the rain and storms that had moved through last night were well to the east and southeast.

The siren would sound for 3 minutes, wind-down, stay quiet for a second or so, and then reactivate. This pattern continued for 30 minutes. Then it would wind-down, stop for 30 seconds or so and reactivate. 3 minutes later it would wind-down and stop. A couple of times it was quiet for a few minutes and I thought that maybe someone at EMA finally got it to stop. Nope! It would activate again. Twice, though, it stopped abruptly without a wind-down, which I'd never heard before. After the second abrupt stop the siren remained silent and didn't activate anymore.

This siren was installed in June 2002. There are several other Whelen 2800 and 2900-series sirens in our city's system; no other ones had activated.

Why do tornado sirens seem to have a glitch late at night/early morning instead of in the afternoon??!!

FedTB wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 29, 2019 3:05 pm

The Whelen 2807 located about a half-mile from our house went off this morning at 4:38, waking my wife and I up. I immediately got out of bed and turned on the TV in our bedroom to a local news channel, expecting to see the multiple county map in the lower left hand corner of the TV screen with our county colored in red, meaning Tornado Warning, with a scroll moving at the bottom of the screen explaining where the tornadic storm was located. Nope! I checked the radar app on my iPhone and there were no approaching storms to the west. All the rain and storms that had moved through last night were well to the east and southeast.

The siren would sound for 3 minutes, wind-down, stay quiet for a second or so, and then reactivate. This pattern continued for 30 minutes. Then it would wind-down, stop for 30 seconds or so and reactivate. 3 minutes later it would wind-down and stop. A couple of times it was quiet for a few minutes and I thought that maybe someone at EMA finally got it to stop. Nope! It would activate again. Twice, though, it stopped abruptly without a wind-down, which I'd never heard before. After the second abrupt stop the siren remained silent and didn't activate anymore.

This siren was installed in June 2002. There are several other Whelen 2800 and 2900-series sirens in our city's system; no other ones had activated.

Why do tornado sirens seem to have a glitch late at night/early morning instead of in the afternoon??!!

It’s possible that the siren may have been being silent-tested and read the radio signal improperly. I can’t really think of what else might have caused that to happen because I’ve never heard of something like that.

I just drove by the siren about 25 minutes ago and two technicians from O'Fallon P.D.'s EMA Division were there, with a ladder extended up to the controls box. Both techs were standing on the ground talking, I'm guessing, trying to figure out what caused this morning's activation.

I'm no diagnostician but it sounds like classic ribbon cable failure from the front panel switches to the control board. From what I've read it seems like a fairly common issue on these units.

The good thing is that the siren blared in test mode volume and not in the much louder emergency mode volume.

The St. Louis FOX affiliate just aired a story about the malfunctioning siren on the 9 PM news a few minutes ago. EMA officials can't figure out why the siren activated. It could've been struck by lightning yesterday or moisture could've affected it somehow; they're just unsure right now. The motherboard has been removed from the siren and will be sent to Whelen for further diagnostic testing and repairs. A temporary Whelen WPS-2803 mounted on a trailer has been set up at a nearby elementary school while the siren is out of service for repairs.