Yesterday morning, the City of St. Louis tested its tornado sirens citywide. Those tests showed improvements in the system from six months ago, when many sirens failed to sound ahead of the deadly May 16 tornado, but showed there is still work to be done.
Of the 60 sirens in the city, 10 remained silent during yesterday’s test, says St. Louis FIre Chief Dennis Jenkerson. That is better than on May 16, when 22 failed to sound.
Jenkerson says that after the tornado, when the city went about trying to fix the broken sirens, they found that some repairs were relatively easy. “Quite a few of them just needed battery upgrades,” he says. (Each siren has four 12-volt batteries inside.) The sirens also have a solar-powered component, and in some cases those panels were blocked by the sun by tree growth—another easy fix…