Sirens, Nixle Alerts and Who's In Charge

Yesterday evening the sirens sounded once again for straight line winds reaching possible speeds of up to 70 miles per hour. The emergency sirens sound anytime the wind speed exceeds 58 miles per hour.  Two Nixle alerts were sent out, one indicating that the sirens issued warning on the orders of the the San Angelo Fire Battalion Chief, and the other from the city’s Emergency Management Coordinator, Steve Mild, asking that pictures of damage be sent to a city email.

“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 that is on duty and myself,” Mild explained this morning.

 “Normally, after hours the battalion chief is the one who has historically been the go-to because he is on duty 24/7, so he’s gonna be basically in his office all that time other than at night when he is asleep," Mild explained. "But then the weather service has been calling him when we have severe weather approaching. Generally that warning up until this point has been coming after hours from the fire department.

Mild said there have been discussions since the thunderstorms earlier in the week, when the battalion chief was out working a fire and severe weather was approaching. The battalion chief then had to call dispatch and have them contact Mild so he could monitor the weather in the event it got severe. Mild said this arrangement "worked out fine".

"But what we are talking about now is that after hours, having the weather service contact me, that way it’s not going to put that battalion chief in a situation that he has to be out on a fire [where] he can’t monitor the weather," Mild continued. "As things happened last night, I was the one that called the battalion chief and asked him to or had the weather service call the battalion chief to have the sirens activated because I was not at my office and they were in a better position to activate the sirens than I was at that particular time.”

The emergency sirens are not activated from either the fire station or the emergency operations center.

“They are actually activated from the public safety dispatch center downtown next to the police station,” Mild said.

According to SAFD Assistant Chief of Operations Scott Farris, it's a matter of making a phone call to dispatch to activate the sirens. 

“It is activated by way of a phone call from one of the people that has the authority to make the call," Farris said. "The dispatchers actually set that off for us."

The other Nixle alert asking for pictures of damage was a success, according to Mild. He received many pictures from citizens displaying damage to areas that Mild said he may not have known about had it not been for the email initiation.

“The outcome was as I expected and I want to thank everybody that took advantage of that,” he said.  “Last night was actually the first live situation run we had on that and it worked out fantastically. As a matter of fact, I was able to find out about the flooding down on Lincoln Park West because of that. I probably would not have known about that had we not had that program out there.  The only thing that I need to educate the public on is when they send those pictures in, I need to know either an address or a general part of town so that I will be able to identify the particular area of town to be able to know where that damage is and where the city’s damage is.”

Mild feels that using Nixle to send out the message for collection of storm damage pictures was a good way to utilize the text message alert system.

“It was very effective and I want to continue getting that message out that people please send those pictures and videos to the [email protected]. It’s an invaluable tool for us out here,” Mild said.

According to Mild, the damage pictures give him an idea of where to look for damage, either after the storm subsides or the next day. “In a perfect world what I would like to do is have a person who is GIS savvy that is sitting here and we can tell them okay we’ve got this damage at this location and they can do the GIS mapping on it.”

The storm damage pictures also help Mild to determine what is worthy of a survey and what is not.

“In the case of last night where I was notified of the flooding, when things kind of died down I went out to that location to actually take a look at the damage first hand,” he said. “So, when I made my reports I can verify and be able to answer any questions that might come up, so there again it depends if it’s something that I feel that I need to go out to, I will go out to it if it’s something I need to out to immediately. The nature of the damage and the current conditions are going to dictate whether or not I go out or I have somebody else got out.”

Lincoln Park West is located out in the Red Bluff area. Mild says that the run off from the area where the newest housing development is at the south end of Southwest Blvd. is responsible for flooding homes on Lincoln Park West Ave. 

“Right now in that area there is not any good drainage and so it spread out and ended up in some homes,”  he said.