Four Tornadoes Triggered Tuesday’s Sirens

ZANESVILLE, Ohio – Many storms happen overnight, which hides and delays the full extent of the damages until they can be better investigated in the daylight.

Muskingum County Emergency Management Agency Director Jeff Jadwin explained how the tornado siren warning system sounds county wide, even the farthest sirens across the county from where the event is happening,

“They are outdoor warning sirens,” Jadwin said. “They are not designed, unless your house is immediately beside a siren, to warn you in your house. So we set the sirens off multiple times the other night because we continued to be under the warning. We continued to have new warnings pop up. So therefore we continued to every few minutes set them off for another three minutes. That is our procedure.”

Jadwin noted that Tuesday’s sirens were in response to two separate storm paths across the county that developed four tornado touchdowns.

All three touchdowns along the northern stormtrack are still being investigated and are currently rated as EF1. The touchdown near Chandlersville was rated as an EF2.

“We started in Licking County and it come north of Gratiot at Poplar Forks Road. Then it jumped, was in the air, come back down at Parr Airport. And then it come back down out at near French Road at Adamsville. We also had another storm that hit the… It didn’t hit in Duncan Falls but we had reports of a funnel cloud in Duncan Falls and then Chandlersville. And again another straight line that it’s the same storm,” Jadwin said.

The Enhanced Fujita scale categorizes tornadoes by their estimated wind speeds. EF1 has wind speeds up to 110 miles-per-hour and EF2 wind speeds can reach 135.