County Official Regrets not Activating Weather Siren during Dream Cruise

At 4:19 p.m. Saturday the National Weather Service (NWS) issued a severe weather statement warning attendees of the Woodward Dream Cruise they were in the path of damaging winds in excess of 60 mph. After seeing the , some wondered why the outdoor weather sirens were not activated.

"Having been at Memorial (Park) in less severe weather and having the sirens activated - why was the warning system not activated this time - with 10's of thousands of people there? So grateful no one was hurt," Royal Oak resident Kim Johnson wrote on Royal Oak Patch's Facebook page.

Tricia Smith, emergency management supervisor for Oakland County Homeland Security, was on duty Saturday to make that decision. Working from the county’s emergency operations center in Pontiac, it was Smith’s call whether to activate the siren.

“I was working with the National Weather Service in White Lake and with ARPSC (the Oakland County Amateur Radio Public Service Corps),” she said. “I was doing my best with the information I had available.”

Oakland County’s policy is to activate the sirens when the NWS issues a tornado warning or a severe thunderstorm warning with damaging winds at or greater than 70 mph. Smith said the NWS warnings all had wind forecasts of 50-60 mph.

“If the county turned on sirens every time winds were it that range they would be on all the time and people would start to ignore them,” she said.

Smith may activate sirens if winds are less than 70 mph, at her discretion. In retrospect, she said, “I feel terrible that I didn’t.” 

Jim Richards is the emergency coordinator for ARPSC, a group of volunteer ham radio operators who work with Oakland County’s public safety and Homeland Security. “Every year we get called to help at the Dream Cruise,” he said. “We provide a back up means of communication and an additional set of eyes and ears.”

Richards says there were 30-35 volunteers at the Dream Cruise to look for things out of the ordinary. “We can do something as simple as help a lost child,” he said.

Richards said they are also trained by U.S. Department of Commerce’s SKYWARN operation to be weather spotters, providing timely and accurate reports of severe weather to the NWS.

“We had very strange weather,” he said. “The wind wasn’t a solid wall that could be picked up by radar. What we had was several very, very small blasts of wind, not one line of wind. It made it very difficult to report.”

Smith said Oakland County law enforcement were instructed to send people home from the Dream Cruise, which they did, but many ignored the warnings and lingered on until 9 p.m. and later.