A member of the Denver Fire Department triggered the errant tornado siren that sounded across the city Monday after he received a false report of a tornado on the ground that he failed to double-check before sounding the alarm.
Read more Denver Pavilions improvements begin; Clyfford Still mural being replaced
The member of the fire department, who has not been publicly identified, went to a physical black box and pressed a button to manually turn on the sirens, which sounded for a full three-minute cycle shortly after 4 p.m. Monday as storms rolled through Denver during a tornado watch that covered the Front Range and much of the eastern half of the state.
The man had received a report of a tornado on the ground in northeast Denver, but did not verify that with the National Weather Service or the city’s Office of Emergency Management as required by protocol, said Loa Esquilín García, a spokeswoman for the Office of Emergency Management.
“He was trying to do his best to make sure residents were safe and did not verify that notification, that sighting, and activated the sirens,” she said.
Esquilín García declined to identify the fire department member or say who reported the supposed tornado to the man, but noted the report was not from an official source.
A spokesman for the Denver Fire Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The city’s emergency sirens can be triggered remotely or turned on at several physical locations in the city, Esquilín García said. Particular teams within the fire department, Denver International Airport and the Office of Emergency Management are authorized and trained to turn on the sirens. She declined to say exactly where the sirens can be activated, citing the need to keep such locations secure.
The city’s emergency sirens are set up to sound automatically if the National Weather Service office in Boulder issues a tornado warning for Denver, Esquilín García said. In such a scenario, the sirens would sound and residents in the danger zone would also receive an alert on their cellphones, she said.
Similarly, if the city were to sound the siren manually for civil unrest or another emergency, officials would also send out an accompanying cell phone alert, she said.
“We send a message to people’s phones saying, ‘Hey, they are sounding, this is what they mean,’ ” Esquilín García said. “Sirens do not sound without a text alert.”
Read more From tennis to T-ball, the White House’s South Lawn is no stranger to sports. But not like the UFC
That did not happen Monday. Instead, the member of the fire department manually set off the sirens on his own, which ran for three minutes before shutting down. The system worked like it was supposed to once it was turned on, and there was no technology failure or malfunction, Esquilín García said.
“The city is implementing corrective actions, including a comprehensive review of alerting policies and procedures and enhancements to training and exercises for personnel involved in emergency alerting and warning operations,” she said in a statement.
Monday’s incident was the third time in five months that city officials accidentally sent out a Denver-wide safety alert. In January, residents across the city received a warning about an “active threat” near the University of Denver — an alert that was “broader… than intended,” city officials later said.
Then, in April, an alert about a robbery in the Ruby Hill neighborhood was again pushed out citywide; police said it was “inadvertently sent out further than intended.”
Greg Heavener, a warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Boulder, said Tuesday that people who receive weather warnings or hear sirens should take a few moments to verify the alert with official sources before taking shelter.
The concern with false alarms, he said, is that people eventually start to ignore all alerts, even those that warn of real danger.
“I can’t say at what number of false alarms people start tuning them out,” he said. “But we are in the prime-time severe weather season in Colorado. So if people start ignoring alerts now, it could pose a greater life threat to them. We are getting to that peak. Storms, tornadoes, flash floods are going to continue to increase across the region.”
Esquilín García said Tuesday that city residents can trust the Office of Emergency Management, but acknowledged “shortcomings” in the warning system.
“We do still have a long way to go to keep building that trust,” she said. “… There is that work that is constantly happening to get better at alerts and warnings.”
Read more ‘At-risk’ Aurora teen reported missing, police say
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.
