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Despite review of earlier Trumbull tornado, notification problems persist
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
For Lynwood Drive Northwest resident Ken Kubacko and his brother, Andrew, being caught unaware of a tornado Sunday was pretty frustrating.
Andrew called Trumbull County 911 at 4:31 p.m., just after they saw a funnel cloud almost directly over the house and reported it, noting that the Warren tornado siren had not gone off.
“It would have been nice to have a warning,” Ken Kubacko said.
The tornado passed his house two doors down on its way to knocking down dozens of trees around homes on nearby Tod Avenue Northwest.
The tornado then ripped off the roof of a commercial building and damaged the Jamestown Giant Eagle.
It’s not the first time some of the sirens were silent.
After a surprise F-1 tornado hit Bazetta Township and Cortland five months ago, the county 911 center and a committee reviewed the circumstances that resulted in thousands of people being caught in the storm’s path unaware.
The National Weather Service in Cleveland did not provide a tornado warning that day until the 911 center called and told meteorologists about it. But the review also suggested other problems with the county’s tornado-siren system. Specifically, it concluded that the county’s patchwork of sirens controlled by various entities would be more effective if one entity activated all 90 sirens at once.
For one thing, that system would trigger the alarms to sound in the Hubbard area and just outside of Warren a minute or so more quickly than now.
It’s not clear if such a system would have helped Sunday, when an F-1 tornado hit the western half of the county in Southington, Warren Township and part of Warren, then skipped to the eastern part of the county, hitting Brookfield.
But some Warren residents, such as the Kubacko brothers, found themselves also unaware Sunday because of another type of glitch.
This time, the problem was that when the Warren Fire Department tried to activate Warren’s eight tornado sirens after the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning, nothing happened.
Fire Chief Ken Nussle said Monday that Bearcat, the company that provided the system, thought the problem was that rainfall prevented a radio signal from traveling to each tornado siren. When the rain stopped, the sirens sounded, Nussle said.
Ken Kubacko said the fire department’s explanation “don’t make sense.”
Kubacko said he thinks he heard the Leavittsburg and Champion sirens going off a short time before the tornado hit but says he thinks he would have taken it more seriously if he would have heard the much louder Warren siren.
Kubacko and Angel Wargo, whose home on Tod suffered extensive damage, both said they heard the Warren siren – at some later point after the storm had passed.
Wargo said her best defense against the tornado was a phone call from her sister about five minutes before. She did not see television warnings because her grandchildren were watching cartoons.
Newton Falls Mayor Lyle Waddell was part of the committee that reviewed the January tornado, but Newton Falls has other ideas for how to notify residents that does not rely on televison or sirens.
The village signed a contract a few months ago with CodeRED, a system whereby voice calls, text messages and emails are sent to subscribers within the direct path of a storm. The system also can be used to notify subscribers of other important information.
Lordstown has been using the system for about eight years, Lordstown Mayor Arno Hill said. The system has alerted residents to tornado warnings and other threats, such as phone scams, Hill said.
Newton Falls expects to spend about $6,000 per year on CodeRED. It is live in Newton Falls now, and residents are being asked to sign up, said David Lynch, Newton Falls city manager.
Ernie Cook, Trumbull County 911 director, said he likes these types of systems, and he has spoken to vendors about creating one for Trumbull County. The cost would be about $60,000 to $70,000 per year, Cook said.
One drawback is that it doesn’t notify everyone because not everyone wants to be notified. It might also not help people without the necessary device, such as a smartphone.
The current Trumbull County tornado siren system involves 23 sirens that the county 911 center operates. The sirens tell the 911 center whether they activated or failed. They are mostly in the northern two-thirds of the county.
There are 33 other sirens the county activates, but it takes more than a minute to activate those, and the 911 center gets no confirmation that they sounded. They are mostly in the Hubbard area and near Warren.
Another 34 sirens are activated by the community in which they are located – Warren, Niles, Newton Falls, Lordstown, Girard and the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport.
Cook said the system would work better if one entity activated all 90 sirens. He thinks some communities would be against that because they want to decide when to activate them.
It was not necessary for Newton Falls residents to be notified with a CodeRED regarding Sunday’s tornado because it was quite a few miles north and headed away from Newton Falls, Lynch said. Hill said he doesn’t believe Lordstown residents received a CodeRED about Sunday’s tornado either.
Cook said he and the county Emergency Management Agency believe when there is a tornado warning affecting Trumbull County, all sirens should be sounded. The reason is because it’s difficult to know where a tornado will “pop up,” he said.