The Siren Board

I was just wondering this but does the Upper Penninsula have any sirens. I could bet some towns use them for fire emergencies but any for tornadoes?

MKEsignal135 wrote:I was just wondering this but does the Upper Penninsula have any sirens. I could bet some towns use them for fire emergencies but any for tornadoes?

Northern Michigan has very view sirens. My guess is the fire departments might have Federal Signal Model Series Sirens. Tornadoes are also unknown, the chances for one to occur are very slim.

Bruce crossings has a federal model 5. Did not see any others when I was up there.

Edit: this siren was mounted on the fire department so I assume it's a fire siren.

Once you go north of Mount Pleasant, Midland, and Oceana county, organized/countywide systems are few and far between. It's basically just a piecemeal network of old fire sirens, most of which are either completely dead or manually activated from a push button inside the station.

Notre.Dame1003 wrote:Once you go north of Mount Pleasant, Midland, and Oceana county, organized/countywide systems are few and far between. It's basically just a piecemeal network of old fire sirens, most of which are either completely dead or manually activated from a push button inside the station.

Yeah that sums up the system.

On the west side of the state once you go north of Big Rapids you are pretty much leaving Michigan siren country. Might find some sirens in the Western UP. I recall seeing a picture of a T-bolt in Ironwood a few years ago.

As was said earlier, tornadoes are rare in the UP. The land is narrow and mountainous so there is no place for a tornado to touch down. There are sirens at fire stations though...mostly used for fire calls. In this video, a siren can be heard sounding in attack at 2:00 during a tornado warning near Norway, Michigan. A search on google maps might show what kind of siren they use. Sounds to me like an STH-10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZepxekHXKM

Not too sure about the UP but as far as the northern LP goes, Alpena has a system of a couple T-128s and a Model 5 if I remember correctly. I live near Traverse City and we have a system of several EOWS 1212 sirens for floods in the Boardman River valley. South Boardman (just south of Kalkaska) has a Model 2 above their fire department, inactive. Kalkaska FD has a Model 5, and Fife Lake Grand Traverse Rural FD has a STH-10. What's shocking to me is that just a couple years ago there was an EF-2 tornado in Kalkaska that killed a man, and every year they are hit with some sort of a high wind life-threatening condition, yet they don't have sirens.

According to Tornadohistoryproject.com, Kalkaska county has had only 8 confirmed tornadoes since 1950 with one fatality. That's one death in 65 years! Most of the county's tornadoes were EF0 or EF1...the smallest kind. Compare that to Kent county's 31 tornadoes during the same period...including an EF4 and an EF5. The farther North you go in Michigan, the less likely you are to be killed by a tornado. Putting sirens in Kalkaska County would be nothing short of a waste of time and money...plain and simple.

Just a personal opinion I suppose, it just seems like every year we get crazy weather that has always ended up in property damages and tons of fallen trees. That weather might not include a tornado, but nevertheless it is property and life threatening and to me that speaks for itself. The last tornado (2007) was three miles from my house and killed my neighbor, and many other neighbors had their houses smashed by falling trees. However I do realize that there's other alternatives to sirens like the CodeRed app for phones and other mobile alerts, I just think sirens are more fun.