New Philadelphia, Ohio (WJER) - Tuscarawas County Sheriff’s officials say they are working to figure out why some sirens failed to go off during Sunday's tornado warning.  

Sheriff Orvis Campbell says the 911 dispatch center is responsible for setting off the sirens in the Dover and New Philadelphia areas. He says all a dispatcher has to do is click an activation button, which took place, but the sirens never sounded.

“Those sirens cannot be heard from within the 911 center, so they received the information that there was a warning. They broadcast it over the radio to all the listening cars and stations that there was a tornado warning, and then they documented that they set off the alarm,” he says.  

Campbell says they want to know if there was some sort of mechanical error to blame.

“Their console speaks to the computer that sets off those alarms, and we’re trying to figure out if that went wrong,” he says. “The company that we work with on that is trying to help us decipher what took place, and we’re going to try to decipher that very quickly and then probably run another test.”

Campbell says a computer system update from a week ago is one possible cause of the siren malfunction that they are looking into.   

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