Leawood 360: E12- Severe Weather Emergency Management

So to get into our topic today, severe weather season always seems to spark questions.

What are you hearing most often right now? As we know, severe weather season is definitely in full swing.

So this season has been unusual in that we have had a whole bunch of tornado sirens sounding, severe weather.

Compared to last year, there was only one siren activation in our area.

And this year, the last I heard, there was well over a dozen.

So we've been getting a ton of questions about, like, why the sirens are going off in certain areas and not others.

Why do I hear them in the distance, not locally? Why didn't my phone go off? Or conversely, why did my phone go off and the sirens not go off?

Who actually controls tornado sirens in Leawood? Because I know this varies from municipality to municipality.

And that is kind of a complex answer for Johnson County.

So the city of Leawood actually owns and maintains 11 storm sirens that cover our city.

The fire department is responsible for budgeting for those, ensuring maintenance is done, replacing them when they get old.

But they're part of a greater countywide siren coverage area, which includes 190 total sirens.

So Leawood, like a lot of the smaller communities, relies on the county emergency management to set the sirens off.

However, some of the bigger municipalities, like Overland Park and Olathe, have the ability to set off the sirens themselves.

So in Leawood, what exactly triggers the sirens to sound?

So there are really two ways they can sound.

So first, and probably the most common, is it's tied into the National Weather Service.

And anytime they issue a tornado warning for whether a spotter has seen a tornado or radar indicates rotation, they issue what's called a polygon, and it's just a projected path for the tornado.

And our sirens actually activate automatically for any siren that falls within that polygon.

Um, the other way they can be activated is manually.

And when that would happen is if maybe a spotter that's working directly with the county sees something that they think indicates a tornado, and they call it in, and maybe the National Weather Service hasn't seen it on radar yet, then the county can activate manually, and then we would do it by district.

So the county's divided up into five districts, so it'd be a wider impact area for the sirens, but it's just being preemptively safe because we did see something.

And the last option is just if they're unsure, they can actually activate the entire county all at once.

That's pretty rare.

In the olden days, that's how it used to happen.