MURRAY – For the first time in more than a year, the storm siren on Glendale Road sounded today.
After failing to sound during quarterly tests last December and March, the city decided to replace a storm siren located on Glendale Road that had problems off and on for years. The old siren was removed and new hardware installed in July, but the unit remained unfunctional until yesterday, when the long-awaited technician arrived to complete the installation.
“What we were doing today was the final install on the Glendale Road siren,” Murray Police Chief Sam Bierds told The Sentinel yesterday. “We’ve had everything in; we just had to finish up the wiring. So, the contractor came down, put the wiring in, put the batteries in. The batteries have to charge in the box for 24 hours before we run the test.”
The siren was tested at shortly after 3 p.m. and worked as expected.
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.
The Glendale Road siren is not the only one in town to have problems in the past year. The siren outside Riviera Courts, which also has not sounded during a quarterly test since last December, again did not sound during the quarterly test last Friday.
“That’s just something we’ve been running down with the technician,” Bierds said. “I may be reaching out to a different company to see if, maybe, a different set of eyes can try to figure out what’s going on. We can get it functional and then the failure just moves. So, we fix one part, and it will work; then another part will fail. And it may be another case, too (like the Glendale Road siren), where it starts to ‘nickel and dime’ us to the point where we want to buy a whole new system for it. We’re just going to have to figure that out at the City Hall level how we’re going to move forward on that.”
