(Spirit Lake)– The network of outdoor warning sirens in Dickinson county may be expanding some more.
The Dickinson County Board of Supervisors today (Tues.) heard a proposal from Emergency Management Coordinator Mike Ehret to add a siren near the Fed Ex facility on 255th Avenue on the northeast side of Spirit Lake. Ehret says the additional siren would serve northeast portions of the city of Spirit Lake, the city of Orleans and the surrounding unincorporated area. He says the cost of the nearly $26,000 solar-powered siren would be split between the three entities…
“It comes out to a little over $8,000 per entity, so not a bad price considering it’s near $25,000 total so it knocks it back a bit for each entity and it gives some coverage out there where we currently don’t have on the sirens.”
Ehret also presented a proposal to upgrade 11 sirens in the unincorporated areas to a two-tone system at a cost of about $47,300…
“What we don’t know when we do the weekly test is if those sirens actually went off unless somebody is sitting there. A two-way system would allow us to basically ping the sirens daily if we wanted to to have them test all the components and systems to make sure that they’re working. It gives us a report right away on what happened and if there’s an issue, a problem, whatever, it sends us an alert so we can address it right away so we know if there’s an issue right away as opposed to waiting for test day or, you know, if someone’s there to hear it when we test it.”
The supervisors took no action on either proposal saying they’ll take them into consideration during upcoming budget talks.
