Belmont County Emergency Management Agency deputy director and Cumberland Trail Fire District fire marshal Curtis Kyer shows how the current tornado siren is deployed.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE – Residents should expect to hear the tornado siren at 9:50 a.m. on Wednesday.

The city has three sirens – one in the center of the city at the Belmont County Courthouse, one at Spring Park and one at the intersection of Johnet and Harbel Drive.

Belmont County Emergency Management Agency Deputy Director and Cumberland Trail Fire District Fire Marshal Curtis Kyer said that the annual tornado drill is part of Severe Weather Awareness Week for the entire state of Ohio.

“We try to do a test once a month. But this is something that’s specialfor the Weather Awareness Week,” Kyer said. “March is that time of year where it’s 70 degrees and then 3 inches of snow, then flooding and wind damage, so the Severe Weather Awareness Week probably should have been two weeks ago to get us ready. But it’s basically just to prepare everybody.”

He added that the excessive wind Belmont County experienced last week resulted in several residents not having electricity for multiple days.

“There were a lot of people that didn’t have power for several days,” Kyer said. “Everybody should expect to be out of power for a while when their power goes out. Every Fire Department in Belmont County was on calls last Friday. I know it was over 24 hours for some people to get their power back. So you need to be prepared for that and Severe Weather Awareness Week is set up to do that and gives you guidance of what you should do to be prepared.”

Kyer added that the big things people should do to ensure they are safe is to have multiple ways of notification – such as different social media sites, NOAA All Hazards Weather Radio, EMA’s National Weather Service and Belmont County 9-1-1’s CodeRed program.

Belmont County 911 uses CodeRed to send emergency notifications by phone, email, text and a free mobile app to keep citizens informed of emergencies like evacuation notices, utility outages, water main breaks, fire or floods, chemical spills or other emergency situations.

Kyer said that having too much information is better than not enough when it comes to time-sensitive emergency notifications.

“The outdoor warning sirens are just one of the many ways for us to be notified. A lot of people are asking all the time about the siren. It’s kind of an antiquated thing to do but I like redundancy. We have CodeRed and the National Weather Service sends out alerts [and there are] social media, weather apps and the NOAA radio. The siren is just another one of those options to have out there to hear it. Not everybody looks at their phone every time their phone dings, and if you’re standing outside that the siren might be the thing that alerts them,” Kyer said. “What I want people to do when they hear the siren in their community is to immediately go to their phone to find out why because it could be a multiple multitude of things. If you hear it, you should be looking to get into some sort of safety and pay attention to the alerts that you’re receiving.”

He added that despite the siren being helpful in alerting the community it is still controlled by a member of the Cumberland Trail Fire District which allows for human error. The city’s service director Scott Harvey, Kyer, EMA volunteer Derek Stewart and Cumberland Trail Fire District Fire Chief Tim Hall teamed up to come up with a plan to get the city on an automated tornado siren.

The new automated system will work on a geo fence for just the city of St. Clairsville.

“Another exciting part is it looks like we’re going to have the ability for them to allow other areas to piggyback off of that. St. Clairsville has kind of taken a huge step here to do this, but the system they’re putting in will allow other communities to copy off of them, if they want to,” Kyer said. The important part is that we’re advancing and taking that human error out of it. And again, it’s just another redundant system. If that doesn’t work, we still have CodeRed and the other alerts. If five things told you there was going to be a storm, you should be happy that all five of them worked. If two of them tell you that there’s something bad coming, that means something failed.”

He added that it may be aggravating when you receive multiple notifications but the main purpose is to relay information during an emergency.

Kyer said that there currently isn’t a timeline to when the automatic siren will be implemented but is excited for the city progressively adapting to build an even more efficient future.