Dallas County is making changes to its severe weather siren protocol.

During this year’s severe weather season, there were inconsistent criteria for the activation of outdoor warning sirens in different areas of the County. Cities on the eastern half of the County adapted Polk County’s system of activating their sirens both during tornado warnings and when there’s a threat of 70+ mile per hour wind gusts during a severe thunderstorm. While communities in the western half of the County, including Perry and Adel, only activate sirens during tornadic activity. Dallas County Emergency Management Coordinator AJ Seely tells Raccoon Valley Radio he was working on fixing this towards the beginning of the year. The issue came to the surface during August 10th’s derecho storm that featured straight-line winds above 70 miles per hour. Many residents in Perry and Adel asked why their sirens didn’t go off. 

Seely explains the new changes, “Anytime there’s a tornado warning, we’re going to maintain that as an activation criteria. If there’s a trained weather spotter that’s reporting a tornado or some type of tornadic activity that could be life-threatening, we’ll go ahead and sound the warning for that jurisdiction. Otherwise, for severe thunderstorm warnings with that greater than 70 miles per hour winds, anytime there’s what we call a polygon, the box you see on the TV, depending on where your community falls within the box, would depend on when it activates. Let’s say the box is moving to the east, and it happens to cover the areas of Dawson and Perry; as long as it falls within that box, we’ll sound the sirens almost immediately after that warning is issued with the 70 miles an hour winds.”

The changes take effect Thursday. When activated, sirens will go off every 15 minutes until the severe thunderstorm or tornado warning is lifted from the National Weather Service.