Oct 28, 2021 3 min read

North Franklin Township hopes to soon have a new siren system installed that will alert all township residents about severe weather and other emergencies.

Bob Sabot, chairman of the township board of supervisors, said at a press conference Wednesday that three sirens will be placed at each of the North Franklin Township fire stations.

According to Sabot, the township paid $60,000 for the Federal Signal Eclipse sirens.

“These sirens will specifically be tied in to the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh, so when a warning goes out for specific things such as tornado warnings, severe thunderstorm warnings, severe flood threats, that the tones will then initiate the sirens automatically,” Sabot said.

Sabot added that the sirens will be able to ignore alerts that come across for surrounding communities but are not relevant to North Franklin Township, and that they will try to limit the types of events that can set them off.

“What we don’t want to do is have that emergency siren go off for everything … and that’s what the board of supervisors was most concerned about,” Sabot said. “We want it to go off for high level events … There are even three phases of flash flood warnings, the third and the highest being the one where our signal would go off.”

Sabot said the sirens can also be activated by non-weather events, such as an active shooter. When activated, the sirens will last for three to five minutes. For fire calls, they will last only a minute.

Though North Franklin Township did not sustain any damage from the tornadoes that hit Washington County last week, Sabot said the weather event would have set off the sirens.

“We had a tornado within a few miles of North Franklin. Luckily it missed us,” Sabot said.

Sabot also clarified that the plan for the new sirens is unrelated to the tornadoes, and that the supervisors approved the plan in September.

The North Franklin Fire Department has stations at 565 Sylvan Drive, 410 Cleveland Road and 20 Greenhill Drive. Chief David Bane said the existing sirens at these locations are antiquated, had to be activated manually and have not been in use for several years.

“One reason we want to update these after talking with the supervisors, from the fire department standpoint, it’s notifying the residents that we have a fire call. Many people where our stations are at walk on the streets for exercise. We have kids that play in our parking lot at our main station,” Bane said.

Jamie Musulin, an account manager for Evans City-based Capitol Electronics, said the sirens will be affixed to metal poles and rest about 40 feet off the ground. While Sabot hopes to have the sirens installed by Dec. 1, Musulin cautioned that supply chain issues could lead to a delay.

Sabot recognized that some residents may balk at the $60,000 price tag, but believes that it is worth being prepared for potentially devastating weather events.

“Is warning one person and saving someone’s life worth $60,000? The township does have the money to do this, and we’re hoping that other municipalities within the county are going to follow suit as well, because we have to be prepared,” Sabot said.