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Warning Sirens a Relic of the Past as Emergency Agencies Move to Phone-Based Alerts

photo by: Photo by Nora Edinger

CUTLINE -- This fire station in Woodsdale once communicated emergencies such as tornados to its neighborhood with a siren system that was launched in case of air raids during World War II. Such broadcast alarms are disappearing since the 9/11 attacks generated a more direct system that can now notify residents of emergencies through their cell phones, landlines or other internet-linked devices.

WHEELING – The long, low wail of siren that could be heard in Wheeling during a late March tornado warning was loud enough to carry for miles – an easy enough fact to check as it is among the last of its kind in the region, according to emergency officials at the local and state level.

For Wheeling residents, any siren sound heard was, in fact, traveling across the Ohio River from somewhere in Ohio, according to Lou Vargo, director of the Wheeling-Ohio County Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.

Vargo noted that sirens still make sense in some situations – such as those used in tornado-prone regions, where getting all residents to shelter within seconds can be critical and cell towers or power lines can be lost or damaged before warnings are transmitted. (Noteworthily, air raid sirens are also still in active use in war-ravaged Ukraine.)

But, he said, Wheeling and Ohio County have moved toward phone-centric warning systems since the 9/11 attacks made communities across the nation reassess how emergencies are communicated. This means area residents with landlines, cell phones or other internet-linked devices likely also got the recent tornado warning via a recorded phone call, a text, an email or even all three.

“I think it’s helpful,” Vargo said of the immediacy of what is effectively a reverse-911 system, with emergency responders contacting residents rather than the other way around.

“In the past, (there were) short blasts of the siren versus long blasts. You had to remember what those meant. Now, everybody has a cell phone. Technology has really helped us get the message out to the public.”

SATURATION POINT

Vargo and Lora Lipscomb, spokesperson for the West Virginia Emergency Management Division, said the point of the system’s evolution to a phone-based one is to saturate the community with detailed information as quickly as possible when there is a crisis of some sort.

That can be a weather emergency – such as a tornado or a flash flood. But, it can also be dangers such as an active shooter, a chemical spill or a missing child, they noted.

A handful of players – local emergency responders, the National Weather Service and the federal government itself – can tap into the new mass-notification system whenever an emergency arises, Vargo said.

In addition to similar alerts long delivered by radio and television, messages can go out by text, email and/or voice at a moment’s notice. The variety of modes is intended to reach people with a variety of phone types, Vargo said, noting his wife uses a flip phone and gets her notifications by text.

All cell phones in the region and any city or county resident with a landline in the Frontier system are automatically in the alert system’s database, Vargo explained. Residents who have landlines with another company must, alternatively, register their phone number with his office at ohiocountyemergency.com.

Because the database for contacts is regional, the alerts can be location specific in a way a siren system could never have been, he noted.

“We can isolate them (alerts) to a certain area of the city or county,” Vargo said, noting the most highly specific part of the system to date sends alerts only to families of known narcotics users. Such families must register in order to be warned if a particularly deadly batch of drugs is known to be circulating in the area.

On the flipside, the system can also cast an incredibly broad net, he noted. If a chemical spill were to happen on I-70, for example, the notification system would alert not only area residents, but any traveler whose cell phone is passing near cell towers in the affected area.

That capability is because the local alerts link into a federal system, both Vargo and Lipscomb explained. It’s a safety net meant to get a specific message out to the most people in the shortest time.

“That’s one of the things that came out of 9/11,” Vargo said of the overarching system, formally called the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS. “There’re a lot of good things about the system.”

STATE OF ALARMS

Not to say that sirens will ever completely go away, Lipscomb noted. Some of the more rural volunteer fire departments around the state still use them effectively, she said.

(Ohio County volunteer responders are linked into a pager and cell phone system that tells individuals where the emergency is and provides a map. “It shows a little fire truck going along the way until they get to where the emergency is,” Vargo said.)

Some counties – including Kanawha and Putnam – maintain their emergency sirens in addition to using the phone-based systems, Lipscomb added. And, counties with special circumstances may forever need a siren system that can alert residents immediately, in case they might be somewhere without a phone.

That is the case in Hancock County, which is within the 10-mile radius of the Beaver County nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Lipscomb said mass notification systems are so multi-layered in such zones that alerts also include vehicles driving through neighborhoods to make sure the word of any crisis gets out.

FURTHER BACK

Vargo said that has always been the point of such alerts, however they have operated. He noted that Wheeling once had a system – before 911 became operational in the 1980s – in which red fire boxes were mounted to telephone poles all over the city.

If a resident saw a fire or smoke, he pulled the nearest alarm, which was hardwired to a machine at fire headquarters. There, a print out of the alarm box’s number gave a general location for responders to head toward, Vargo said, noting they still had to locate the actual fire or smoke by sight once they got into the vicinity of the alarm box.

Woodsdale and the downtown headquarters, which was historically located where the Soup Kitchen now operates, also had air raid siren systems that dated back to World War II, Vargo said. While those have been removed, city residents were recalling their use as recently as 2018.

In a Lunch With Books program at Ohio County Public Library conducted that year, attendee Geneva Cole of Wheeling described her childhood experience with such sirens, which were used for drills.

“My memory is of being very afraid,” Cole said at the time, noting their home had to go dark during the drills. “…The siren would blow … My mother would sit in the rocking chair. She would have the baby on her lap, with my sister and I on either side – and we would have a blanket over our head and she would have a flashlight and she would read and try to keep us from being so frightened.

“We were so frightened because we didn’t know whether we were going to be bombed,” she continued.

Lipscomb noted that such sirens – a system that had been developed in case Germans bombed the city – were also widely remembered to have been wailing during the Shinnston tornado in 1944. More than 100 people across the state died in that F4 weather event.

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