Nearly half of city tornado sirens that were broken in May still don’t work

Yesterday morning, the City of St. Louis tested its tornado sirens citywide. Those tests showed improvements in the system from six months ago, when many sirens failed to sound ahead of the deadly May 16 tornado, but showed there is still work to be done. 

Of the 60 sirens in the city, 10 remained silent during yesterday’s test, says St. Louis FIre Chief Dennis Jenkerson. That is better than on May 16, when 22 failed to sound. 

Jenkerson says that after the tornado, when the city went about trying to fix the broken sirens, they found that some repairs were relatively easy. “Quite a few of them just needed battery upgrades,” he says. (Each siren has four 12-volt batteries inside.) The sirens also have a solar-powered component, and in some cases those panels were blocked by the sun by tree growth—another easy fix. 

Some of the sirens that did sound yesterday still need to be made louder, says Jenkerson. And one siren in North City has been missing entirely.

For most of the other broken sirens, the fix is more complicated than new batteries or trimming some trees. Some have problems related to their circuit boards or computer software. The city has put out a bid for an upgrade to the entire system that would fix the 10 sirens, make the system more secure, and enable sirens to make different sounds for different emergencies. Says Jenkerson, “We’ll be able to use this activation system to warn people of other probable or pending disasters.”

Asked why six months later this much work is still needed, Jenkerson says that the city had to weigh the costs and benefits of upgrading the system versus getting rid of it and installing a completely new one. Jenkerson says city leaders settled on an upgrade: “I can make the recommendation but I am over here at the fire station; that decision is made at City Hall.” One post-May 16 upgrade that has been completed is making the warning system automated, meaning when data from the National Weather Service shows a potential tornado encroaching on the city, the sirens sound without a human having to take action. In May, when the tornado hit, no one at the City Emergency Management Agency nor the Fire Department pressed the button to activate the sirens. Now, when data from the National Weather Service shows a potential tornado encroaching on the city, the sirens sound without a human having to take action.

Why It Matters: Tornado season is generally considered to fall roughly from March to July, though experts make clear they can strike in the fall and even winter. In the aftermath of the May 16 tornado, Mayor Cara Spencer was adamant about figuring out what went wrong with the sirens and promised to fix the system. “When public systems fail, the public deserves to know how and why, and we as a city take responsibility to fix the issue,” she said in August. The Fire Department took over control of the siren system four days after the tornado.

What’s Next: Neither Jenkerson nor the mayor’s office could say when the system upgrade would be complete. “When somebody asks the Fire Department to fix a problem, we’re going to fix it,” says Jenkerson. “If I were to have it my way, it would have been fixed a month ago, two months ago.”