Dear Answer Man, do you know why the tornado sirens went off — just once, thankfully — on Saturday evening? At least two parts of town had this happen and it was right about bedtime for some kids who are learning that the sirens mean "head for the basement." Even for the rest of us, it was time to check the weather radio, just to be sure. — Helen
Another reader, Rich Kuiper, also noted that the sirens went off in the Elton Hills neighborhood about 10 p.m. Saturday. "When I contacted the county Monday morning, I was told they are not sure what happened and are looking into it. I continue to be a bit skeptical about the reliability of the county's emergency siren system, given the fact that ours failed to activate during last year's tornado due to a software glitch. It seems we had another 'glitch.'"
Well, Mike Bromberg, deputy director of Olmsted County Emergency Management, says it wasn't a glitch exactly. He called it a "quiet test" of the system that affected all 67 sirens throughout the county.
Bromberg said, "We were working on the system, doing some maintenance to make sure it was functioning correctly," and in the course of that work, the sirens sounded for a few seconds. The system "gets burps" infrequently and "90 percent of the people" don't hear it, he said.
No public statement was put out before or after the incident, he said. If it had been an emergency, sirens would have sounded for three minutes and then been followed by a statement on the emergency alert system.
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That said, some public information on a random siren sound late at night might have been useful to the 10 percent of people who were wondering.
