Allen County Emergency Management Director Jason Trego briefed County Commissioners Tuesday on issues with the Genasys emergency alert system from the early Monday morning storms that moved through Allen County, in particular with people in the Geneva area who said the never received an alert
Trego said he has been in contact with Genasys customer support, and while they indicate alerts were send and indicated to have been received, there were people who didn’t get the alert. Some of those indiiduals report they did get text alerts on a severe thunderstorm warning issued about an hour and a half later. Genesys has their technical support team looking into this.
Another issue involved people only getting texts and not phone calls they also signed up to receive. Trego said is based on default settings when the system was installed, which only sends texts for severe thunderstorm warnings, and both voice and text on tornado warnings. Genasys has updated this to also provide phone notifications
Another issue from the storm was that tornado sirens were not set off. When the tornado warning was issued for northwest Allen County. Trego said this was because the warning polygon did not cover any of their siren sites. The nearest siren to the warning polygon was at Carlyle, one of the three siren locations Allen County maintains and just outside the polygon area.
Trego said while some people feel all sirens in a county should sound even if only a small sliver of the county is in a warning. The National Weather Service has done studies on this very issue, and there is a thing known as warning fatigue, where people hear the sirens too often and become dismissive when they go off.
An example he gave was of sirens being set off in Elsmore for a tornado in the Geneva community, on the opposite end of the county. The issue of tornado fatigue came up in the aftermath of the 2011 Joplin tornado.
If you have questions about sirens or the Genasys systen, Trego has a considerable amount of information on this on the Allen County Emergency Management Facebook page and more information on their web page at allencounty.org.
Coffey County had some issues from that storm, with people in Gridley and LeRoy reporting they did not hear the sirens, which were set off in both cities. They were sounded a second time, which Coffey County Emergency Management says it won’t do again because of the potential confusion with an all clear, which is used in some places but not in Coffey County.
Complicating matters in Coffey County is an ongoing cellular outage involving Verizon towers in that area. This likely was a factor in some people not getting alerts or wireless emergency alerts that can be sent by the National Weather Service. This is one of the reasons why you should have an alternate means of getting alerts, such as NOAA Weather Radio, broadcast radio and TV and various websites available,
