San Angelo Warning Sirens: Myths and Misconceptions

The City of San Angelo celebrates the start of each month with the sound of sirens. In order to test its alarm systems, the San Angelo Fire Department sounds off a siren on the first of every month. That is scheduled to happen in two more days.

Although the sirens do go off when San Angelo is threatened by a tornado, that is not the sole purpose of the alarm system.

“There is a misnomer that those are tornado sirens,” public information officer Anthony Wilson said. “They are not. They are warning sirens for any sort of emergency that we may encounter that would endanger the public’s health and safety.”

For example, Wilson said that the sirens would also be used in case of train derailments or wildfires endangering the town.

The SAFD is responsible for the maintenance of the sirens as well as the city’s department of Emergency Management. Emergency Management Coordinator Steve Mild, when we asked him about the sirens last year, said, “Under our policy, the people who have the authorization to activate the warning sirens are the county judge, the mayor, the city manager, the police chief, the fire chief, the battalion chief [who] is on duty and myself.”

The purpose of the sirens, according to Wilson, is to warn the public of impending danger and advise them to seek further information.

“If [anyone] should hear a siren at noon on the first of the month and they are unsure if it is a test or not, they should seek further information on the website and social media from a weather radio, from the local news media, and determine from themselves if they need to take some sort of action,” Wilson said.

Because the purpose of the tests is to check if the alarms around the city are functioning, maintenance is sometimes required.

“We do occasionally hear concerns from people that they didn’t hear the sirens, and in some cases, it is because there has been some sort of malfunction of the siren,” Wilson said. “That’s what the testing is for: to determine if they are working properly. If they are not, then they are repaired.”

If people do not hear the sirens while indoors, Wilson encourages citizens not to worry.

“There are some instances where people would hear the sirens from inside and they’ll go outside and see what’s going on,” Wilson said. “That’s the exact opposite of what you should do. The sirens are meant to warn people who are outside. They are not necessarily meant to warn people who are inside, but those who are outside to take cover and seek more information.

For those curious to check the location of the sirens, the city website provides a map of the alarms’ coverage.