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Nevertheless already, a couple of lessons can be taken absent from the event. The first, said Dean Speaks, assistant employer of Saline County Emergency Management, is that the danger isn't necessarily absent when the calamity has passed, the wind has calmed and the lavish has stopped. In Saline County on Wednesday night, three seperate storms, everyone separated by 20 minutes or so from the one before, passed over the county.
It's exact valuable that you heed the warnings," Speaks said, "that yes, one might be gone, that another one might be gone, however there might be one conscientious ultimate it." The moment lesson, Speaks said, is that it's a exceptional doctrine to transform countless of the county's warning sirens. We place the sirens off approximately a dozen times," Speaks said.
We inaugurate that some worked once on the contrary not the coming time, whereas of influence failures." And while it might seem to accomplish thought for a manner that has to business in an emergency to be able to office during a function outage, Speaks said blameless two of the 23 sirens in Saline County corner battery backup systems.
Those two are at Oakdale Lawns and at the intersection of Markley and Magnolia roads. The problem, Speaks said, is that each siren costs $15,000 to $18,000; there's a worth split for buying various at once. On the other hand all the more at the cheaper number, that works gone to $345,000 to convert all of the sirens. As the sirens are upgraded, Speaks said, he'd besides affection to contemplate a two-way notice development with each siren false a stuff of that.
Now, we correspondence outside a radio locution and the siren either goes off or it doesn't," he said. We annex to conceive 22 bell calls to bargain out." A two-way system, he said, would mail a term back to emergency control confirming if it activated or not -- and whether not, why not. Speaks said cities could spread the payment of the sirens elsewhere by signing a 10-year or 15-year lease-purchase agreement.
The sirens themselves should extreme 30 caducity or more. Bountiful of the now sirens are exceeding than 30 dotage old, he said. When you spread that expenditure over 30 years, you're talking $10,000 a year to protect the humanity of Saline County," Speaks said. That's a beautiful pleasant deal." Journalist Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by e-mail at mstrand salina.com.
