The Siren Board

February 28th an EF 3 tornado went through Naplate IL and crossed the Illinois river into the south side of Ottawa causing much damage in both towns and unfortunately killing 2 people in Ottawa. If you search "Ottawa IL tornado" there are several good videos of it on YouTube. I live on the north side of Ottawa near I-80, from my front porch I could hear the roar of the tornado and could also hear Naplate's siren (I think it's an STL-10, I'm no expert but it was pretty low toned) when Ottawa's 2001s and the rooftop Thunderbolt 1000 downtown came on I headed for the basement. Naplate's siren was on the roof of the Pilkington glass factory and they suffered a direct hit that caused heavy damage to every building and also took out the siren. I'm not sure of it's fate, it may have been scrapped already but it didn't look that bad to me just a little bent up but they said it was beyond repair. Naplate is a small town that doesn't have a lot of money so I wondered what they would do. Tonight there was an article in the paper that they had ordered a new "WPS 29" siren which I assume is a Whelen 2900 series, for a little over $30k. I'm not sure how they're paying for it but it says they have a gofundme page that has around $3k so far.
http://www.mywebtimes.com/news/local/na ... 6ed59.html

Glad your ok, I was in a tornado the day after Christmas in 2015. It came within 200 yards behind my house, scariest moment of my life, definately something you never forget.

Glad your ok, I was in a tornado the day after Christmas in 2015. It came within 200 yards behind my house, scariest moment of my life, definately something you never forget.

Thanks, we didn't have much damage up here mostly tree limbs and power lines down. The whole town was without power for several hours and the south side was out for 3 days, the power company had over 400 people working and had to replace over 80 poles. I was really impressed with how fast they got everything repaired. I work for the city in the water dept and we worked from shortly after the tornado came through at 5pm until 3am trying to keep everything pumping. After that I spent several days doing this: It's hard to see in this pic but we had 3 huge piles of trees and limbs. They had a company come in with a grinder that can take trees up to 5 ft in diameter and ground it all up and hauled it away, 125 semi loads.

It doesn't look that badly damaged apart from the bent up "legs". I smell just another excuse to get a new siren.

I agree that sren definately looks saveable. Oh yeah the debris piles are incredible after a tornado!

Hopefully someone here could get the STL-10

Aside from a few of the horns, it looks like it survived. They should fix it up and move it to a part of town that needs more coverage.

I think they just figured that since it was 60+ years old it wasn't worth reusing. I have a feeling it's in a scrap bin somewhere. The new siren is gonna be on a pole in a park in the center of town, it's a pretty small town so one siren is enough.

Surprisingly they didn't scrap it. There's a bunch of things in the paper tonight about the year anniversary and one of them is this picture and the caption saying that they're using the old siren in a memorial.