Webster County EMA Coordinator Dylan Hagen On Saturday’s Outdoor Siren Activation

The outdoor siren system in Webster County normally go off as a test of the system every Saturday at Noon. This past Saturday, they system did not activate at Noon but rather shortly after 5 PM. While this rare, it is not competently unprecedented. In February of 2020, the last time it happened the siren activated an hour before its normally scheduled time. The reasoning for the issue then was a glitch in the software system. When the siren went off on Saturday evening, I (Rob Jones) reached out to Dylan Hagen the EMA Coordinator for Webster County via email to find out what happened. Below is Dylan’s statement on the incident.

“On Saturday May 22, 2021 at approximately 5:08pm the outdoor warning sirens activated across
Webster County for 1 minute. After further investigation into the activation, the regularly scheduled
Noon siren test was somehow delayed, due to a malfunction in the operating system within the
computer. While we initially investigated the issue of the sirens not activating at Noon, there was no
reason to believe the sirens would activate at a later time.
Webster County Emergency Management Agency takes this incident very seriously. The issue is
currently being worked on with our vendor, to get it corrected as soon as possible. As a reminder to
residents, if there is a Tornado Warning, sirens will activate for 3-minutes with a wail tone, as opposed
to the Saturday test, which is a 1-minute activation with a wail tone.”