By Janelle MacDonald - bio | email
LOUISVILLE, KY (WAVE) - On Facebook, WAVE 3's friends noticed something missing during the severe weather Monday morning.
"I'm in Shively in Jefferson County, Kentucky," said Wanda. "We didn't have any tornado sirens go off until the warning was canceled. The bad weather woke me up around 3 a.m. and I stayed up, calling family to wake them up too."
"I was up at 4 and never heard sirens in the Hikes Point area," echoed Michelle.
"They did not go off in Fairdale, Kentucky at all," said Dan.
WAVE 3 is working for you, tracking down answers as to what happened to the emergency alert sirens in Jefferson County.
MetroSafe Director Doug Hamilton says his late-watch employees didn't know to sound the system. "Our encoders didn't get it, so they therefore didn't sound the sirens," he said.
Hamilton says the city's emergency responders get storm warnings through a radio signal that comes from the National Weather Service to an encoder.
"We have two of them," Hamilton said. "One of them is a primary and one of them is a backup in case one of them should fail."
Monday morning, neither of them got the message.
Hamilton said, "we know for a fact we didn't receive the 4:31 a.m. signal (with the tornado warning.)"
The National Weather Service in Louisville says it sent out the signal and confirmed its equipment was working. A print out from WAVE's emergency alert system shows we received it.
Hamilton says MetroSafe staff checked the antenna, the connection and the rest of the equipment. All of it is working. He showed us the log of messages the encoder did receive.
"We received messages before this incident, the last one at 4:21," Hamilton said. "We received one at 4:47 but we did not get one at 4:31."
Why? He's really not sure.
"We can only assume it's that issue that occurs with digital communications where occasionally the signal between transmit and receive is interrupted," Hamilton said.
Hamilton says he doesn't know the answer but vows to work with the National Weather Service to figure it out.
"We want to try to figure out is there some other way to keep this from occurring again because people do depend upon us to give them notice when they're outside," he said.
One very important thing Hamilton adds is that the sirens are not designed to be loud enough to wake you up inside your home during a rain storm. They're designed to warn people who are outside. He says your best safety measure for your home would be to buy a weather radio.
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