City and county government leaders in Warren County are engaged in a protracted conversation about updating or replacing the network of tornado sirens that alert area residents when it’s time to take shelter. With parts of the system aging and falling into disrepair, some leaders are losing patience with a lack of action, while others aren’t feeling as much urgency.

It’s important to note that while all of the tornado sirens in Warren County are activated from the independent 911 dispatch center located in Warrenton, each town owns and maintains its own sirens, said County Emergency Management Director Jim Sharp. Marthasville and Truesdale each have one siren, while Wright City and Warrenton each have several. Unincorporated Warren County has no sirens.

Since before the COVID pandemic, the leaders of those four towns, the county commission and the emergency management agency have been engaged in talks to replace the sirens with one unified, updated system that will function better as a whole. However, differences over the details of such an arrangement have, until recently, slowed any action.

After a meeting in June, Sharp said he is now engaging two companies to conduct surveys of the sirens in the area and make recommendations about how to perform unified upgrades, along with what those upgrades will cost.

“They’re going to come out and conduct a formal survey ... of where our sirens are, what the coverage looks like, and some of the technical details,” Sharp commented. “We’re also going to ask them to make a couple recommendations, based on our growth and where we’re developing, of where we should maybe put new sirens.”

Currently, the strongest push to take action on the sirens is from Wright City, where two of the city’s three tornado sirens are nonfunctional and not repairable. The city government has held off replacing the sirens while in talks for a county-wide project, but Wright City aldermen have recently  become vocal in their frustration over the risk of having the system out of order.

Still, Wright City Mayor Dan Rowden said he sees the benefit of patience to develop a cooperative purchasing and upgrade plan that could potentially save each entity money.

“It’s still very preliminary, but we’re off the ground now at least,” Rowden commented in early June. “We may or may not be able to pull it off, but we felt this was the best initial step to get the survey and what the cost is (for upgrades).”

Potential frictions in the discussion have come from different perspectives on the need for new sirens, along with opinions about who should be responsible for the sirens going forward. Truesdale Mayor Chris Watson, for example, said his city’s tornado siren is perfectly functional, and that to justify spending tax dollars on a joint project, an upgrade would need to offer tangible benefits to public safety.

Marthasville Mayor David Lange, meanwhile, said his city is enthusiastic to cooperate in replacing the sirens. But Lange believes that one entity should take responsibility for the care and maintenance of all the sirens in the future. That would be either the county government or the 911 dispatch center, both of which have no interest in taking responsibility for additional equipment.

Those details will have to be worked out as intergovernmental talks continue. The first expert survey of the storm sirens will be conducted in July, giving leaders further information of how to move forward.