On Tuesday April 30, 2024, the Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Office Communications Center performed a test of the Fond du Lac County Tornado Sirens. All the tornado sirens worked correctly. The county’s service provider checked computer software and paging equipment and found that everything is in working order. An internal review identified human error as the probable cause of the siren test failing to activate Saturday. The dispatcher selected the “end siren test” rather than “start siren test” button on the screen. This triggered the siren paging system to send the command to turn the sirens off, rather than on, and the sirens never activated. In the event of an actual tornado warning our dispatchers confirm with law enforcement officers in the field that our tornado sirens are activating. Had there been a real tornado and the wrong button inadvertently selected, this would have been immediately identified and corrections made to activate the sirens. We were able to determine that at no time was our county-wide siren system out of service. In response to this error during testing, we have revised our procedure to confirm with law enforcement officers that our Saturday noon siren tests are working correctly, in addition to activations during tornado warnings. Additionally, in the event of a hardware or software malfunction during a real storm event, the communications center has a secondary plan in place in which each municipality with sirens is notified to manually activate the siren system within their jurisdiction. When we were notified by a Fond du Lac
Public Works electrician at 12:11pm Saturday that the siren test did not activate, this secondary plan was activated and each community was notified that they may need to anually activate their sirens in the event of a storm until we could determine the cause of the test failing to activate. Last, we would like to take this opportunity to remind citizens that tornado sirens are not audible throughout the entire county, and should not be depended on as your sole source of a tornado warning. Residents are strongly encouraged have alternative means of receiving alerts during inclement weather, including the use of weather alerts on their cell phone or the use of a weather radio.
