MURRAY – Residents on the south side of Murray will soon be able to take solace in knowing that, when severe weather is imminent, they will hear the warning call as the City of Murray began installing a new storm siren on Glendale Road last week.
Crews from Murray Electric System and Swift Roofing assembled in the Village Medical parking lot on Tuesday to take down the old eight-speaker system and install the new one, which features a single rotating speaker.
The Murray Police Department oversees the city’s storm sirens as a matter of public safety. Their dispatch unit transmits the signals that activate the sirens. As such, ensuring the proper functioning of the city’s storm sirens falls to Police Chief Sam Bierds, who said that installing the speaker is only the first step. The control units still must be configured before the siren is operational, which he expects to be done either this week or next.
“This is the biggest part; (it) requires the most coordination because we had to get a crane and get a bucket truck to get that thing up there,” Bierds said of the installation, and he thanked Swift Roofing owner Robert Swift for donating use of the crane and Murray Electric System for providing the bucket truck and linemen needed for the installation.
“It just makes everything go a whole lot smoother and saves money – I looked into what it would cost to rent a boom (lift), and it ‘ain’t’ cheap,” he said.
“At this point, I’m ready to have it operational,” Bierds added, “but I’m just glad we’re actually at this stage of it. It took so long just to get here – to get it built, to get it sent to us and coordinating putting it up. So, fingers crossed, that we won’t have anything bad coming (before the control units are installed).”
The City of Murray owns four storm sirens located within the city limits – one on the south end of Doran Road; one in the Village Medical parking lot on Glendale Road; one near the entrance of Riviera Courts, a mobile home park on U.S. 641 N; and one at the Murray-Calloway EMS building (formerly Fire Station 1) downtown, which is the only one of the city’s sirens that is activated manually.
Murray State University owns the sirens located on its properties, including the main campus and one by the Cherry Expo Center. The City of Hazel also owns two storm sirens. Despite Calloway County Emergency Management’s role in coordinating quarterly tests, the county does not actually own any storm sirens.
Quarterly siren tests are conducted for a reason – to detect and fix malfunctions before the next severe weather event – so a siren having the occasional problem is to be expected. But problems with the Glendale siren have become increasingly frequent for more than a decade, and it is not the only storm siren in town that has had issues. In recent years, the Riveria Courts siren has followed suit.
Problems with the Glendale siren go back at least 12 years. “In the city of Murray, period, we’ve got a problem,” former Calloway County Emergency Management Director Bill Call told the Murray Ledger & Times in March 2013. “The one (off Glendale) has not sounded for the last several tests and that’s a concern.”
In March 2024, The Sentinel reported that the Glendale and Riviera Courts sirens failed to sound during quarterly tests in December and March. At that time, Bierds explained that the Glendale siren had blown a fuse – a longstanding problem for that siren, specifically – while the Riviera Courts siren had issue with the radio.
“Those two sirens are relatively old,” Bierds said in March. “For whatever reason, we’ve been trying to piecemeal it together for, I guess, quite some time. When the repairman came down (after the December failure), he (said it) needs to be replaced.”
“We can repair it, and maybe they can last a few weeks, a few months, but they don’t make it to the next quarterly test,” he added. “We don’t know when they’re going down unless we’re going out there every day and testing them, and I think the citizens would be a little upset if I set the sirens off every day.”
As of last week, the Riviera Courts siren is still not functioning properly. “Riviera, we’re still chasing down problems,” Bierds said. “It’s like, ‘Is it this one? No.’ So then we go to the next one. ‘Is it this one? No.’ Eventually we’ll either find the problem or say, ‘No, it’s the entire system. We need to replace it.’”
Read all of The Sentinel’s coverage of this issue:
City officials respond to storm siren failure (3/8/24)
Storm sirens still not working (5/8/24)
Storm siren update (5/26/24)
