Indianola’s fire chief says last Wednesday’s mishap with the city’s tornado sirens underscores a larger problem with how the alarms are sounded.
The sirens are currently located at one of the fire stations in town, and Chief Orlando Battle told The E-T this week the current system is not the safest or the most efficient for Indianola’s citizens in the event of a severe weather outbreak.
The siren is activated from Fire Station 2, which is located on Garrard Avenue.
“My whole problem with that is Station 2 was without lights (electrical power), so how can we sound it if we don’t have lights?” said Battle.
The fire chief said the signal operates on electricity, and in the event of a power failure, their only recourse is a generator.
Battle said state-of-the-art natural gas generators were donated to the city years ago that would have automatically turned on and given power to the siren system in the event of a power failure, but the generators were never placed into operation and were eventually returned to the donor.
He said a basic generator is available now; however, “That means our guys have to get out of their beds, go out in the storm to plug up a generator. Does that sound right?” he said.
Battle said he raised similar concerns to the previous fire department administration and has asked the current city leaders about making a change, but his request has gone unheeded. He is adamant that the siren does not need to be at the fire station but at a centralized location where there is always someone on hand to activate it.
His suggestion is the Indianola Police Department and said he and Chief Edrick Hall have already discussed it and agree, but he said the decision is not up to them.
The decision lies with the city lawmakers who are yet to act on the department heads’ request.
If Indianola were to have had a tornado, and the firefighters from Station 2 were out on a call, how and who would have sounded the tornado siren?
“That’s a million dollar question,” Battle said.
In times past, CodeRed, a mass notification service that allows residents to receive emergency alerts directly to their landline phones or cell phones—including severe weather, fire or evacuation notices, if they registered for it—was used to alert citizens, but it is apparently no longer available in the county.
According to a March 2015 news article, the county had a contract with South Delta Planning and Development District to provide the service through grant money.
Mayor Steve Rosenthal said the City of Indianola had also pledged assistance to the county to help provide the service. However, the grant was discontinued and the county elected not to pay for the service.
Assistant Fire Chief Bill Alford said previously when a county-wide system was used, residents in the southern portion of the county chided the department for “disturbing people and scaring people to death” by sounding the sirens in Indianola when the storms occurred in the northern area and presented no immediate threat to this area.
His other contention is that the firefighters could be away from the station on an emergency call when the word comes to sound the alert.
“What if we were out? We (were) lucky, we had just missed it, we’d just got a call right before then,” he said.
Battle said minutes before the severe weather struck last Wednesday night, his men were called to respond to a motor-vehicle accident just north of town on MS-448.
