Ask Angelia: Are those tornado sirens near a Greenville County landfill?
Question: For over a year, there's been a tall metal pole visible above the trees at Enoree Residential Waste and Recycling Center on Anderson Ridge Road. I asked an employee at the drop-off area about its future use, and he didn't know anything about it. In the last week or so, something was erected on the pole. From most of a mile away, my guess is tornado sirens. Is that right, and will they add more equipment later?
Answer: It's a cell tower, said Greenville County spokesperson Bob Mihalic. Jessica Stumpf, director of Greenville County Emergency Management, said the county does not have tornado sirens nor does it operate any.
Why? The sirens are only meant to be heard if you are outside, Stumpf said.
The county emergency management had concerns about the tornado outbreak last April, she said, "we knew those storms were going to be hitting in the middle of the night."
Tornado sirens are not meant to wake you up in the middle of the night in the event of an emergency, Stumpf said, and there would need to be a lot of such sirens to cover the entire county to where people could actually hear them.
"If a storm was coming through and we had those sirens, that thunder might be so loud you don’t even hear (the sirens)," she said.
The county and state emergency management agencies recommend that residents select a variety of ways to receive weather and emergency alerts, including use of a NOOA weather radio which broadcasts continuous weather information directly from the nearest National Weather Service, and registering for CodeRED Alerts in Greenville County.
CodeRED releases a variety of notifications for emergency situations or critical community alerts, including evacuation notices, bio-terrorism alerts, boil water notices, and missing child reports.
"There’s a lot of other tools out there to alert people other than those sirens," Stumpf said.
Do you have a question you want answered? Send it to me at davisal@gannett.com or via mail to Angelia Davis, 32 E. Broad St., Greenville, SC 29601.
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Reader Asks Angelia about pole sighting near a Greenville Co. landfill
