John Halbach joined the Greenbush town board two years ago. Since then, he said, maintenance of the town’s tornado warning siren has been a constant issue.
“Every time they come out, they have to bring a lift,” Halbach said, adding that maintenance was “very expensive” for the town.
Then the siren broke.
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At its most recent meeting on Nov. 25, the town board learned the repairs would cost $7,781. A full replacement would set the Sheboygan County town back around $20,000.
“We certainly don’t have that kind of money,” Halbach said.
The board voted not to repair the broken siren.
Municipalities are not required to install tornado warning sirens, according to Katie Rousonelos, public information officer for Wisconsin Emergency Management.
“As far as sounding them off, we don’t sound them off either,” she said. “That’s the county or municipality that owns them.”
She recommended having multiple ways of getting severe weather warnings, adding that “there’s not one way that’s one hundred percent foolproof.”
In Greenbush, Halbach said residents could continue relying on cell phone alerts, TV news, their neighbors and weather radio for notifications about severe weather.
Retired tornado siren a sign of the times
Halbach has lived in Greenbush for over 40 years. He says the siren used to play a larger role in town life.
“That’s what signaled (to) a lot of people when there was a fire, that was the only way,” he said.
When the siren sounded, “everybody on the farm dropped their stuff, and they went, they helped,” he said.
Rousonelos said when she first moved to Wisconsin, some rural towns even used their tornado sirens to signal lunch time.
Most of the small dairy farms around Greenbush have been consolidated in the past couple decades, according to Halbach. Today, he believes Greenbush firefighters don’t get the same flexibility their predecessors did.
“They’re working at a job, it might go off, and depending on where they work and who they work for, they may not allow them,” he said. “It’s changed a lot.”
He said the town now relies on the MABAS system to call firefighters from nearby towns in emergencies, and that the siren only reaches one quarter of the town’s area.
For him, maintaining the system — whose weekly tests gave some residents peace of mind — just wasn’t worth it.
“Money’s been tight for townships and municipalities forever now, and it’s getting worse because we can’t keep up with inflation,” Halbach said.
He said the town’s board usually gets around $150,000 in tax revenue to allocate each year. In 2024, while saving money on a siren repair, it was able to put some money towards a new fire truck.
How common are tornadoes in Wisconsin?
“We do have strong tornadoes,” said Ed Hopkins, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison-affiliated State Climatology Office. “And it would be appropriate to have some warning to that.”
He pointed to the 1984 Barneveld tornado in Iowa County — which killed nine people and destroyed 90 percent of the village — and the 1996 Oakfield tornado in Fond du Lac County, which caused no deaths but destroyed a local canning company so thoroughly that it scattered cans across a 50-mile radius.
Hopkins said Wisconsin’s tornadoes are concentrated in what he calls “Wisconsin’s Tornado Alley,” or southwest and south-central Wisconsin, and near Eau Claire around Interstate 94.
Of the 45 tornadoes to hit Wisconsin in 2024, most were within those two regions. Only one — a February tornado in Evansville in Rock County — caused an injury.
Hopkins said that was Wisconsin’s first-ever recorded February tornado. Tornadoes typically form in the warm, humid air of summer.
Sheboygan County, home to Greenbush, hasn’t seen a tornado since 2018. It was low-magnitude, and happened on the same day as several twisters in Fond du Lac County, the site of the 1996 Oakfield tornado.
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