EMA: Fairfield County Sirens Won’t Be Late Again

LANCASTER, Ohio—The Fairfield County EMA says the county’s tornado sirens were delayed during Tuesday night’s storms because of a “computer glitch.“ 

EMA Director Jon Kochis says it was a problem with newly-updated software and incompatible hardware.

He says the county’s 36 sirens and the City of Lancaster’s eight independently-operated sirens are all automatically triggered by a computer that recognizes a series of tones issued by the National
Weather Service. 

PHOTOS: Photos From Pickaway County Storm Damage

Last night, Fairfield County Sheriff’s Office dispatchers had to activate the sirens manually.  And city police dispatchers had to shut theirs down when errant NWS tones triggered them after the tornado
warnings had expired.

“You know with computers, sometimes they just don’t act the way they’re supposed to.  That’s why we like to have a human interface in there that we can go in there and manually override.“

Kochis says the computer issues were fixed by Wednesday morning.

“This problem will not exist again,“ he says.

Kochis says the county is adding another layer of human backup soon.

Kathy Smith was watching the storms from her Stoutsville home’s back windows.  She says she saw what looked like a big dust devil coming across her back yard.  It sounded like a giant fan, she says.  It tossed the pool furniture in all directions.
“The shed went straight up in the air and, like, exploded and fell apart,“ she remembers.  She saw the contents scatter and the shed’s twisted frame fall in the neighbor’s pasture.

She says a text message from a friend was her only warning.  “I heard the sirens about five minutes later,“ she says.

Forecasters with the National Weather Service Office in Wilmington, Ohio, sent an urgent bulletin at 5:36pm saying, “Doppler Radar indicated a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado. This dangerous storm was located near Stoutsville ... moving east at 25 mph.“  The tornado warning was scheduled to be in effect until 6 p.m.
The bulletin said that Amanda was one of the cities in the path of the storm.  And a few minutes later, that’s where the next damage was reported.

Wednesday morning, NWS forecasters told NBC 4 they were planning to send a team of inspectors to Fairfield County to assess the damage.  They would then determine whether the storm had produced a tornado, a microburst or damaging straight-line winds.

Not far down the road from Smith’s house, in Oakland, the roof of Raymond Sisco’s trailer is stuck in a tree. He says he heard the hail pounding the roof and then heard the “creaking and squeaking” as the roof was torn off the trailer.  He says his insurance company wouldn’t give him coverage for the trailer so he will have to tear it down himself.

“About the time it came on the news about the tornado in Stoutsville, it done been through here,“ Sisco says.  He didn’t hear sirens beforehand either.

Marguerite Amerine was picking up tree limbs in her front yard in Oakland Wednesday morning.  She was at work when the storms came through but he neighbors told her they were terrified.

“It was pretty bad for a while,“ her neighbor told her.  “She said she thought the side of her trailer was going to get blowed in.“

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