Tornado Sirens in Lucas County, but Media Sleeping?

Robert Shiels of WTOL broke in at 9:03 pm to remind viewers that the local governments have sole discretion about the sirens, but at this point there is nothing from the NWS to indicate a need for any more than a thunderstorm watch.

Yeah, my husband just called me from the softball fields at McCarthy (near the zoo) - I could hear the sirens in the background.

He said its like a monsoon over there. Right now, we don't even have rain here in Sylvania. (Though it was pouring earlier.)

Regional radar at 9:00 pm:

I was up in Detroit earlier this evening in the middle of these storms, and then they suddenly tracked southeast. They must have followed me back from the Detroit area.

Curse you, historymike!

:)

P.S. I have a good friend who lives in Milwaukee, and after hearing her reports of the weather over there, I'm sure its not entirely your fault. ;)

according to the RADAR station, lol, the sirens went off due to fire guys in Providence twp seeing rotation.

Lucas Coounty Skywarn net, radio hams, have a report that the sirens were triggered by a Lucas County sheriffs deputy spotting rotation in a cloud in Providence Twp. It apparently turned out to be nothing. The sirens are set off at the sheriffs department.

What surprised me the most is that the local stations are usually all over any decent-sized thunderstorm, yet for this considerable storm they provided little coverage. I watched WDIV in Detroit from 6:30 to 7:30 PM, and they had non-stop coverage of this series of storm systems, several of which had rotation and also some reports of funnel clouds.

When I drove home to Toledo, nada, and then 10 minutes after I get home in a hellacious storm cell, the sirens went off. Anyways, here is a closeup of the Doppler radar from WTVG's website about 40 minutes ago:

it does look like the northers are getting hit harder than us, could that have something to do with their coverage being better?

While driving home from the Detroit area I took this image on I-75 near LaPlaissance Road about 8:20 PM or so (my wife was driving the car, not me). This is looking southwest toward Toledo:

Within five minutes the sky went from a slightly overcast daylight to an ominously dark blanket of doom. Naturally, none of the Toledo radio stations had much to say.

I really knew we were in for a strong storm when the dog we took with us - a notoriously storm-freaked pooch named Shadow - suddenly crawled under the bench seat in the back of the minivan. He starts acting goofy about 10-15 minutes before a big storm: I'm not sure if he hears distant thunder, feels a pressure drop, or exactly how he knows when a storm is a-brewing, but Shadow is better than the TV stations at predicting a coming blast.

Sure enough, by the time we hit Alexis and Detroit, the skies turned pitch black and it was storm craziness:

I was at the Mud Hens game tonight and they evacuated the stadium due to the tornado warnings.

still going strong out here in Lake Township/Pemberville x Woodville Rds, just had more thunder and the rain has started again for the 4th time!

There were no tornado warnings. Someone at the Lucas County Sheriff's Office needs to go to SKYWARN class next year. Someone, like the entire frigging body.

Anybody else lose power? We were out for around 2 hours in South Toledo.

And I wanted to stab Toledo Edison's automated voice-recognition android pseudo-person who "answers" their customer service phone number. Completely worthless! But I sure am glad they got the power back on relatively quickly.

Mike, I've had that happen several times before. When I'm watching TV (which is really not very often), the weather people are beside themselves over any little rainstorm or minor snowfall. Then they started encouraging people to call in on their cell phones, and they began featuring e-mails and phone updates from people who would say things like "It's raining hard and I'M GETTING WET AND THE WIND IS BLOWING!!" Or, "It's really cold and the snow is coming down!" Citizen journalism at its worst, and most boring.

Then when the neighborhood sirens are going off, and I turn on the TV to get some weather info ... same thing you caught, Wife Swap, or some other really ridiculous show. After several occasions like this, the spouse and I decided we are not going to spend any money on TV improvements and we are not going to consider TV to be a timely or useful source of accurate weather information.

I would think that for the rest of this tornado season, all the weather spotters (law enforcement) might be extremely proactive on the sirens, because of damage already suffered.

I was out in the storm, and as someone characterized it, it was like a monsoon. I was totally drenched. Had a hard time driving home, and had to pull over in a drug store for about 10 minutes. Then I continued home in the severe storm. I thought Bill Spencer said at one time that tornado sirens are sometimes sounded for severe storm warnings, even though no tornado is spotted. When I got home, I turned the TV on, and sure enough, as everyone here has already stated, nothing from the local media. Very disappointing.

For the most part, the TV coverage of the violent weather in these parts last 4-6 weeks has been excellent.

Why they dropped the ball Friday I haven't a clue...staffing issues with vacations, maybe?

So basically what it comes down to is when they report on the weather everyone is pissed because it's too much and when they don't report on the weather everyone is pissed because it's not enough.

Got it. Typical.

So basically what it comes down to is Ryan serves no purpose on ToledoTalk except to act like a troll.

RE: Toledo Edison/First Energy. The automated system is horrid, I agree. If the power goes out EVERYONE in the affected area needs to call. A TE representative at a Holland Village Council Meeting explained that if just one or two folks in the affected area call to report an outage they assume its just a small area and assign it a low priority for repair.

Which brought up the question from those attending about how come TE didn't already know how much of the grid was down. Don't they have ways to moniter where electricity is flowing and where it should be flowing and where a transformer might have blown up? Apparently not. Figures.

Sorry if the truth hurts Mike. Toledoans are by and far their worse enemy.

Your "truth" does not sting, Ryan: you just spend most of your time being cantankerous and unnecessarily contrary, especially for someone who claims to be born again. Do you think that it would be possible for you to go a week without yanking chains on Toledo Talk?

So people DON'T complain to complain? How is that yanking chains? It's funny that when you make a proclamation it's true and good and when I make a statement I am causing trouble.
Whatever - I could hardly care. It is what it is, as they say.

Your...'talents'...could be put to use on Swampbubbles...

I think you play for the right team, lol...

Ok, probably a dumb question here, but why are they sounding tornado warning sirens for thunderstorms where there has been no tornado sighted?

And when did this start?

The sheriff's office is supposed to sound the sirens when the National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for all or part of the county.

But the sheriff does not have to wait for the NWS to issue a tornado warning. If the sheriff feels the weather is severe enough to sound the sirens, he can do so. Outside of a tornado warning being issued, sounding the sirens is within the discretion of the sheriff.

If trained storm spotters observe rotation, and that information is relayed to the NWS, I believe a tornado warning gets issued. I guess in this incident, the sheriff felt the weather was too severe to wait for an official warning, so he sounded the sirens.

And supposedly, the sirens are meant to warn people who are outside. They are not meant to warn people who are inside watching TV with the AC on or shopping at the mall or dining inside a restaurant. I guess that also means the sirens are not meant to wake people who are sleeping inside.

Somehow I'm getting a mental image of Telb looking hopefully at the sky, wondering how long it's going to take before he can blow the siren.