COUNTY SIGNS OFF ON REVISED SIREN SCHEDULE

Published September 6, 2006

SEGUIN — Residents along the county’s lakes and rivers should get ready for a new Saturday afternoon ritual.

Guadalupe County commissioners voted Tuesday to allow emergency personnel to test the county’s flood warning system once a week.

Beginning on Oct. 7, the county will test its 15 warning sirens along the Guadalupe River at noon Saturday. The tests have been conducted at 10 a.m. each first Wednesday of the month.

“We would like to do it during a time when there are more people at home so they can actually hear that we do have sirens,” Guadalupe County Emergency Management Coordinator Dan Kinsey said. “They would know whether they can hear it in their house or not.”

If any problems should come up with the system, the county could then correct them and then do a retest in a shorter period of time, Kinsey said.

“The only way to retest that on three of the items is to do a full sounding of the siren,” Kinsey said. “As you can imagine, if you sound the siren without notifying everybody, then people are wondering, ‘what’s up?’ So we either have to try and notify everybody through radio, TV and the call-back system, or wait for another 30 days to test it again.

“This way we can just have a seven day wait before we can have a test,”? Kinsey said. “It is really just to be a little bit more proactive in the way we test our sirens.”

David Welsch, Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority director of project development, backed Kinsey’s recommendation for frequent testing of the flood warning system sirens.

“We talked about it at Lake Management Group last week,” Welsch said. “Everyone agreed. We had some concerns. We didn’t know how many calls we would start receiving for an interim period if we were testing every Saturday. If we run into issues, we can modify it. It seems like it is the right thing to do at least for now.”

Welsch said GBRA will put out materials to homeowners explaining the flood warning system.

“We have a refrigerator magnet program that we are going to introduce that will allow people to stick it some place to remember where their flood warning book is, then pick it up and understand what the sirens means,” Welsch said.

The county put in the flood warning system after the 1998 floods, which caused much damage in Guadalupe County. The flood sirens were paid for by a grant.

More flood warning sirens are on the way because of a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Through the $130,000 grant, the county will receive six or seven new flood warning sirens.

County commissioners approved the installation of Time Warner’s Roadrunner cable at the Emergency Operations Center located at the Sheriff’s Office. The Emergency Operations Center is the place where city, county and local emergency officials come together to coordinate their efforts during an emergency or natural disaster.

Kinsey said the EOC has Internet access, which is the county’s system. The Roadrunner system would be used for Internet access by out of county personnel so that their system would not be interconnected with the county’s Internet because of the fear of viruses hurting the county’s system.

“The other thing that it [Roadrunner] does, in the event our system goes down, it provides us a backup to where we could use the other system [Roadrunner],” Kinsey said. “While we are at it, we are going to get the cable TV so that we can monitor the Weather Channel, national news, CNN, different things like that.”