On February 18, Autauga EMA, in conjunction with the City of Prattville, Autauga E-911 and Weather Message Siren, installed the WxSiren Controller software to change our severe weather warning system over to a Polygon warning system. The polygon warning system will only sound a siren in the areas that are in the path of the severe weather. This allows the warning to be more precise.

The WxSiren Controller can be used to manually or automatically activate sirens. When operating in automatic mode, it receives National Weather Service products from Weather Message and compares those to your settings to determine the sirens to activate.

WxSiren Controller contains a full featured geographical information system (GIS) engine. This allows it to visually plot the received polygons and determine the sirens that fall inside the polygon. The GIS engine supports multiple layers. This allows Autauga EMA to install custom road and feature layers available for the area.

Autauga EMA was able to group the sirens into three distinct zones, along with individual sirens in remote areas. The groups are (1) the 13 City of Prattville sirens; (2) the two Marbury sirens; and (3) the two Autaugaville sirens. The rest of the sirens, 10 in all, are activated individually if they are within the polygon parameters.

Autauga EMA set up their system to receive signals both via satellite and by internet. By creating this redundancy, it insures that if one system went down, they would continue to receive signals from the second.

The WxSiren Controller also texts messages to first responders and key officials when an event takes place in the location that the sirens are activated. This provides for more expedient notification to our personnel that need the information and provides more lead time to respond and prepare.