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Apr 18, 2008 5:52 pm US/Central
Residents Question Severe Weather Call & Siren Use
Seema Mathur
PLANO (CBS 11 / TXA 21) ―
During Thursday night's storms many North Texans heard emergency sirens, even though there were no warnings of tornadoes.
In Plano, there are two systems that most people depend on – one is a loud siren set off by individual cities, the second is what's called a code red phone call. Friday some residents questioned the use of both.
Joe Martinez spent part of Friday enjoying lunch with friends, but he says the phone call he received, warning him of last night's storm, concerns him. "What really got me is it said that the thunderstorm was gonna be in Anna about 9:40 and so I looked at the clock on my screen and it was 10:40. So I thought we should be dead by now."
Collin County Homeland Security sends out those calls – nearly 80,000 of them Thursday night.
CBS 11 News was told that some of the phone calls were received late because the system is set up to only call 60,000 people an hour. Last night calls started going out at 9:38pm.
"So just the mathematical problem there is that, we had more calls going out than could go out, even in an hour," explained Kelley Stone with Collin County Homeland Security.
The calls are meant to be secondary, with city sirens meant to be the more urgent warning.
In Tarrant County the cities of Watauga, Keller, North Richland Hills, and Richland Hills all individually decided to sound their sirens Thursday night. "We recommend sirens whenever a tornado is approaching, a tornado warning has been issued for a community and also particular strong straight line winds, 70, 75 mph or higher," said Bill Bunting with the National Weather Service.
In Collin County and Plano folks were puzzled as to why the siren was used last night and not last week when storms were more severe.
"[There were] no sirens and the wind was a lot stronger than it was last night," said Plano resident Gigi Frost.
Realizing the limits of their system, Collin County officials say they will now prioritize their calls to rural areas first - since people there can't hear the sirens.
As to why the sirens were used Thursday night, Plano officials say the storms, then and last week, both met severe weather criteria, but last week's storm was moving so quickly that a last minute decision was made not the sound the sirens.
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