No more lunch whistle?

For the sake of keeping everyone alert to the possibility of danger, Emergency Management Coordinator Ed Robinson said last week that he’s considering the idea of putting an end to the noon siren in Sundance.

The issue came up because of recent changes made to the National Weather Service alert system, he told the Sundance City Council. Just as when an Amber Alert goes out, he said, everyone’s cell phones will now activate when a storm of severe enough magnitude is on the way.

At the state level, said Robinson, emergency management coordinators have decided it would be a good idea to address how local sirens are being activated and make sure they sound when a warning is issued for a storm of severe magnitude. This, he said, is for the simple reason that people are going to want to know why they didn’t hear a siren if there was potential for serious injury and property damage.

“Any time the alert goes out, the siren should be activated too,” he said.

This brought to light that all four of Crook County’s towns have different systems for their sirens, different people responsible for setting them off and different criteria for doing so. This creates something of a “haphazard” alert system on a countywide basis, Robinson said.

“They should be standardized throughout all those communities,” he told the council.

Robinson said he would like all the towns to agree to a standard protocol and offered to facilitate such an agreement between the communities. That way, if a resident from one town is located in another town when the siren goes off, they still know what it means and what to do.

When questioned by Council Member Callie Hilty as to how often the siren might sound to warn of a severe storm, Robinson responded that around 10% of the storms that occur nationwide are considered to be of sufficient severity to merit an alert.

“The chances of your sirens going off for that kind of alert, it might happen every couple of years or so,” he said.

Mayor Paul Brooks explained why Sundance performs a daily siren test, explaining that the city was obliged to test it on a weekly basis. Rather than scaring the community every Saturday, he said lightheartedly, the city decided to scare them every day so as to desensitize them.

This, said Robinson, is a problem in itself. Very few jurisdictions still perform a daily siren.

Robinson himself is against the daily siren, he said, because it, “Breeds complacency with your general public.” After a while, people start to tune the siren out for at least the 30 seconds it would usually sound.

If an alert was sounded at 12:30 p.m., he said, this means it wouldn’t work to warn the public for those first 30 seconds. He also pointed out that the noon siren scares tourists and visitors until someone lets them know it’s just a test.

In the past, members of the community had fridge magnets to explain what the different siren sounds mean and what dangers they represent. Robinson said he also wants to do away with this system and just have one siren that tells people they need to get indoors.

“It’s not meant to convey specific information,” he said. “It’s meant to drive you from outside to inside and to get more information.”

While the council was willing to give its blessing to an update of siren protocols, Brooks pointed out that it would be premature to pass a motion to that effect when there is not yet an official plan for them to review. He requested that Robinson bring back such a plan to the council, and also asked that he bring it to the Northeast Wyoming Economic Development Council because it represents a cross-section of the communities in this region.