The town I grew up in tests the sirens every day at 1:00. Unfortunately, You can’t hear it in the house unless the windows are open. The last time a tornado touched down (two blocks away) the storm was so loud you couldn’t hear the siren at all. One would think that they would take that into account when designing a siren…
At least where we are the sirens are the same. But the civil defense / air raid signal was and still is a wavering up & down sound. The tornado signal is just a steady wail at the highest pitch. The system also has massive loudspeakers which can broadcast voice messages. Since we can hear several speakers at once from different distances, it can be real hard to understand.
Given modern communications, all it really needs to do is alert me to the need to investigate fuirther via the internet or TV.
where i have been a steady siren is a watch (conditions are likely, stay aware, listen to radio/tv). a warning (severe weather or tornado is actually happening and you should take appropriate shelter) is a wavering tone.
Yeah, we don’t have sirens as we get tornadoes so rarely here. The last time I was near a tornado was this one. I remember that summer because I was pretty young and I thought it was wonderfully fun that we got to have a ‘slumber party’ in the basement with our sleeping bags and the birds and the radio going so we could hear what was happening. I also remember Grandma pointing at the sky and saying we should get home, that looked like a tornado.
So no sirens, but at the warnings we went to the basement and stayed there. If it happened again, I’m sure I would probably do the same.
ah ok, thank you; our test alert was indeed a solid tone. That makes more sense now.
We take tornado sirens pretty seriously - the children and wife go immediately to the safest room in the house and hunker down whle I check the conditions and weather broadcasts.
In my old college town we had sirens. The problem was, they tested them every Saturday morning (perhaps purposely timed to wake people up early on the goddamn weekend) and at other times seemed to go off randomly, so we got inured to the sound quickly. People stopped responding to them.
You missed the “go outside to see what’s happening” option.
Native Okie. Yup, that really is what we do.
In my house, we’ll generally already have either TV or radio tuned to weather, but if we didn’t, we’d turn it on to see what’s going on. If there’s severe weather happening, there will be at least 3 channels running nonstop weather coverage with all the bells and whistles. They’re really good here. They pinpoint when and where storms will hit down to the minute, and they’re not far off.
The sirens, not so much. They’re running on pretty outdated technology. Sirens are generally county-wide, so a siren can go off for a storm that’s 30 miles away and moving the other direction. No point in taking shelter for that.
After actually reading the thread…
They test sirens here weekly at noon, on either Friday or Saturday (work/home). High solid tone. A siren going off means a Tornado Warning. If they ran sirens for all the severe weather or the watches, we’d be listening to sirens for weeks on end in the spring. My town is in the middle of replacing the siren system (it’s over 30 years old), so we’ll see how they work after that.
At work, we have to go to the basement when sirens go off, regardless of where the storm actually is. It’s a PITA, but I understand why they do it. I’ve spent entire days trooping up & down, up & down, up & down as different storms went by.
If I heard sirens at night, we’d probably head to the basement and check on things from there. Well, I’d bet at least one of us would go outside anyway unless it was already so bad that things were bashing against the windows.
Gary England, I remember watching him when he first started, I think I was around 5 or 6. He used to get so excited; he’s pretty calm these days.
My favorite was a few years back when the tornado went right over their station. For some reason I can’t remember there was no camera running, or maybe I just had it on radio. Anyway, about a minute before it was due at their location, you heard Gary say something to the rest of the crew and then for a second all you heard was headsets dropping and running footsteps. Gary came back on for about another 20 or 30 seconds then said something like “Got to take cover now” and dropped his headset. The station went to blank air for about a minute and then he was back. Dude knows his shit - he invented half the stuff the Weather Channel (and everyone else) uses.