Spencer County officials explain why sirens didn't activate during initial tornado warning

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Sirens in Spencer County didn't sound during an initial tornado warning on Sunday.

The National Weather Service confirmed an EF-1 tornado touched down near Mt. Eden with winds estimated at 90 miles per hour. The roof of a barn was blown off and some trees toppled over, while others snapped.

"We were just sitting inside," Colton Hawkins, a Mt. Eden resident recalled. "We noticed it was getting real windy, just real, all of a sudden just got super windy...We never heard a siren, never heard a siren and you know that's not really good for this community to have a siren that doesn't go off when a tornado is that close."

The county's emergency management posted on Facebook Sunday that it held off on siren activation because only part of the county was under a tornado warning.

Six of the county's nine sirens are operated by battery power only. Spencer County officials said if the sirens had been activated for the initial warning, the batteries would have been dead and the sirens would have been inoperable, when the larger warning was issued.

"It's my family," Josh Crowe, who has family in Spencer County, told WDRB. "I want to make sure that they're safe. I want to make sure that nothing happens to them, that God forbid if this was a big tornado that did come through, would they have the proper warning? Would they have the proper notification?"

Spencer County District 2 Magistrate Mike Stump said these alarms were just tested a few weeks ago to make sure they worked. He was alarmed to find out they weren't activated sooner.

"Anyone would think that if a tornado warning was issued by the National Weather Service that it would be an immediate response to activate all the warning systems available to us," Stump said.

Stump said they've learned from this, and now moving forward if a tornado warning is issued in Spencer County, those sirens will go off.

"If you do it initially and you run the sirens everyone knows, then we've done our job," Stump said. "We've alerted everybody in the county and if the batteries run out, the batteries run out but you can't wait until after some people have already went through the warned area to decide to warn everybody else."

He said public safety is their number one priority, and they are going to do everything they can to make sure everyone in Spencer County stays safe.

The Sunday night storms knocked out power to thousands and caused widespread property damage. The National Weather Service in Louisville has confirmed that an EF-1 tornado touched down in Fairdale during the height of the storm. A second EF-1 was confirmed about four miles south of Shepherdsville.

No injuries have been reported.

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