Longmont should instead "move away from warning siren technology and look at other options for providing information to our community" about impending potential disasters, the staff said in a memo for Tuesday night's City Council study-session discussion of the siren system.
Longmont normally tests its sirens at 10 a.m on the first Monday of each month from April through August. Longmont's Outdoor Emergency Warning System website, however, says the system will not be tested Monday.
The Boulder Office of Emergency Management, in partnership with Boulder County and the city of Boulder, traditionally also begins monthly audible tests of its countywide system of sirens outside Longmont on the first Monday in April and will be doing so Monday, according to Carrie Haverfield, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office.
Longmont's city staff said that because of serious malfunctions last year, Longmont's warning siren system "is shut off and will remain that way" until the City Council makes a policy decision about the system.
Last Oct. 13, the city's system experienced "a catastrophic malfunction" when many of Longmont's 17 outdoor sirens began self-activating as early as 3 a.m., the staff noted in its memo.
That unscheduled sounding of Longmont's sirens, which continued until shortly after 5 that morning, was the second serious malfunction of the system manufactured by Boston-based Acoustic Technology Inc., city officials said.
They said the earlier system failure occurred last June 14, when a siren pole at Sandstone Ranch activated on its own at about 4:50 p.m.
"The siren was not able to be shut off from the dispatch center as we had been trained to do, and we were left to figure out how to shut off the siren on our own, manually," the city staff wrote.
"The Sandstone Ranch fields during the summer at this time are busy, and calls were flooding the 911 center, possibly delaying any actual emergencies from being addressed. We had to dispatch a fire engine with a crew to climb up to the siren box and manually shut off power to the pole after getting in touch with an ATI technician who described how this was done."
After that June failure, ATI assured city officials that "could simply never happen again."
Then, when multiple sirens sounded off early the morning of Oct. 13, city crews were again unable to deactivate them from the control software in the Department of Public Safety's dispatch center.
Instead, the city used Longmont Power and Communications and fire crews to manually deactivate each of the 17 siren locations.
The October failure "caused significant consequences in the communications center, where dispatchers were forced to handle over 800 calls related to the sirens," the staff reported in its memo.
"At this point, city staff has no confidence in the ATI system and for safety reasons will not turn the siren system back on," officials wrote the council.
One option might be to fully replace the current system with one made by another manufacturer, but the cost could be about $500,000.
A second option, the city staff said, would be to permanently disable the current outdoor warning siren system and not replace it. Instead, Longmont could "undergo a marketing and education campaign for our community to understand how to utilize technology" such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather radios and weather apps for smartphones.
A third option — which also would eliminate any possible use of outdoor warning sirens — would "augment our existing communications technologies," such as adding dispatching software designed to alert people about severe weather through text messages.
That option, which could include buying weather radios "for the portion of our community that does not own smartphones or computers," could cost an estimated $150,000, officials estimated.
"An argument can be made that the city does not need" an outdoor emergency warning system, the city staff wrote.
"It is important to remember that the City of Longmont uses its OEWS for only one purpose. To warn the portion of our community that is outside that there is immediate danger from severe weather and they should seek shelter immediately. It is not intended to reach those that are already inside.
"This has been a point of confusion for years despite our attempts at education," the staff said. "We have also seen some confusion as a result of neighboring jurisdictions," such as Boulder County's use of its siren system for multiple types of hazards, including floods as well as tornadoes.
Longmont's severe-weather siren system is not used for flood warning alerts.
John Fryar: 303-684-5211, jfryar@times-call.com or twitter.com/jfryartc
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