The city of Hamilton received a 2013 Federal Emergency Management Assistance grant to replace three of the eight existing tornado sirens in the city. The City Council voted Wednesday night to approve Special Revenue Funds to match the $25,499.75 grant award for the $51,000 project, barely an hour after a tornado destroyed several houses in Greene County’s Cedarville.
The city is removing all but one of the existing eight sirens in Hamilton and adding the three new sirens, which will provide the same or better amount of coverage, according to Hamilton Public Works Director Rich Engle. The city’s Emergency Management Performance Grant application shows that the current tornado siren on Eaton Avenue will remain, while new sirens will be placed on Ford Boulevard at the north end of the city, on University Boulevard on the south side, and at Ridgeway Elementary on Wasserman Road on the west side.
The new sites were chosen based on an acoustical sound propagation study the city conducted with Federal Signal, according to the grant application.
The application states that the current system, last upgraded in 1970, doesn’t cover the entire geographical area of the city, and that the consolidation of the city and county dispatch centers presents a further challenge in alerting residents of extreme weather emergencies in a timely manner.
Hamilton Police Lieutenant Dan Pratt, who is assigned to coordinate the grant funds with the Butler County Emergency Management Agency, said that the city has had issues in the past of keeping the older sirens working, or ensuring the sirens reach all residents in the city.
“(The current sirens) are very old,” he said. “The current anticipation is that we’re going to put those three in different locations, and replace the existing ones as we get additional funding.”
He said that now that the grant money has been received and the matching city funds have been allocated, he will place an order with Federal Signal Corporation, a private company that provides siren and signal services.
Federal Signal Ohio manufacturer representative Craig Huth, who has worked closely with the city of Hamilton for years on their warning signal system and was involved in writing the grant, said that the new sirens will cover a much bigger range of area than the city’s older models.
“The new sirens are Model 508, whose coverage at 70 dBc (decibels relative to the carrier, or the strength of a signal at radio frequency) is 7,300 feet,” he said. The older sirens probably had about half to a third of the coverage, he added.
Pratt said that the new sirens will automatically send signals back to the Butler County 911 Center, so officials will know instantly if there is a problem with the siren.
“For the last few siren tests, we have had to have spotters go to each location to let us know if (the sirens) are working or not,” he said. Since those tests were conducted on a monthly basis, the issues wouldn’t always be known right away, he said.
Huth said that once the purchase order is processed, equipment delivery is about six to eight weeks. Hamilton’s Electric Department will install the new sirens themselves, providing approximately $17,000 in cost savings in labor and material, according to the grant application.
The grant application states that the alternative of not replacing the sirens would leave approximately 17 percent of Butler County residents without sufficient warning siren coverage.
©2014 the Journal-News (Hamilton, Ohio)
