BY TOM O'NEILL
The Cincinnati Enquirer
FELICITY -- Because the main tornado warning siren in the village had been rendered inoperative by lightning and never fixed -- no one claimed ownership -- the only siren residents heard last July 2 was manually activated by firefighters after the storm hit.
Too late to help anyone.
A year later, all that has changed. This community of sweeping hilltop vistas and rolling farmland is much better prepared to handle a tornado emergency, several officials and residents said. On July 2, 1997, it was not.
The village and Franklin Township in March agreed to a 50-50 split of maintenance costs for the primary siren, located atop a pole near the vacated elementary school near Market and Vine streets. The repair cost $2,500. The siren, which can be heard within a radius of 4 1/2 miles, was erected in the late '60s by the Zimmer power station as a nuclear-event warning (Zimmer later became a coal-fired plant.) Later the siren was operated by Civil Defense, but subsequently ownership of the siren became unclear.
The siren on Vine is connected to the Clermont County Emergency Services warning system. The backup siren at the Felicity Fire Department must be activated by hand. It is almost a mile from the Country View Mobile Home Park, where more than a dozen homes were severely damaged or destroyed in the tornado.
An additional warning siren will be installed near the intersection of Ohio 774 and 133 in Franklin Township within 60 days, Felicity-Franklin Assistant Fire Chief Jim Shafer said. County commissioners appropriated $12,000 for it.
"We're a long way from being totally prepared, but we're a lot better equipped to handle another one then we were a year ago," Mr. Shafer said. "The bottom line always was the money issue. . . . We got a wake-up call. Each community needs to take things like this more seriously."
Many now do. Following the tornado, several communities, including Owensville and Batavia, upgraded their warning systems, said Jim Owens, director of the county's emergency management.
Unrelated to the tornado, the National Weather Service also has altered its tornado warning procedure, now issuing warnings before tornadoes actually touch the ground, Mr. Owens said.
The county continues to test its siren system on the first Wednesday of every month, but it has no way to know when a siren doesn't go off unless local officials or residents notify them.
The siren system was tested the day of the tornado last year, but no one from Felicity alerted the county that the siren at Market and Vine did not go off.
That was nothing new. Everybody knew the siren did not work. No one wanted to take on the costs of fixing it.
