JACKSON COUNTY, AR (KAIT) – The National Weather Service
issued a tornado warning Tuesday evening that included Jackson County.
When officials tried to activate the tornado sirens to alert
the area, nothing sounded.
"My staff went to set the sirens off and discovered that
they weren't working," said Sheriff David Lucas simply.
Lucas calls it an unexplainable problem given the recent
work done to all the sirens.
"It was kind of strange," he said, "because this past Saturday,
they spent the day changing the batteries out on all of [the sirens] and doing
audible tests on them, and they worked."
The sheriff's staff also tests the system silently every
night using a remote controller in the office.
The device sends a signal from the sheriff's office in
Newport to the Jackson County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) facility in
Diaz and would normally switch on the sirens.
The connection, however, failed Tuesday and has not worked
since.
It appears the computer network connecting the sirens
throughout the county malfunctioned, making them all inoperable. Emergency
workers could not activate them manually either.
"We just went into what I would call a recovery mode to try
to figure out okay, they're not working," Lucas said. "What do we need to do to
get the word out?"
The sheriff sent out his deputies Tuesday to alert people
using sirens from their patrol cars. They also alerted the local media and
switched radio frequencies so that people could pick up their scanner traffic.
"We'd do that again if it ever comes up again," said Jeff
Phillips, the Jackson County judge. "We want people to be safe."
Phillips now plans to bring in some help to find the flaws
in the system and correct them.
"We're going to do everything we can to assure everyone that
this won't happen again," Phillips said. "Of course, it's electronic. You never
can tell, but Saturday, [the sirens] were working. We replaced batteries and
did some tests and they were working, so between Saturday and now, I don't know
what happened."
A technician is expected to come as early as Friday to
inspect the entire system.
County officials are unsure when they will have the sirens
back online, so now they are hoping that the extended forecast contains no
severe weather.
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