Elizabethtown now has its own tornado siren, the first in town history.
The Elizabethtown Fire Department and Duke Energy completed installation behind Elizabethtown’s town hall Friday.
Duke workers installed a pole and made the electrical connections to hook the siren into Bartholomew County’s emergency warning system, said Fred Barnett, Elizabethtown Town Council president.
The siren will now go off whenever Bartholomew County Emergency Management activates tornado sirens throughout the county, Barnett said.
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It also will benefit those who live in the countryside surrounding Elizabethtown to warn them about threatening weather, he said.
The project to obtain the town’s first tornado siren began in 2013, when the town’s fire department and a group of Cummins Inc. representatives did a Six Sigma project on disaster recovery and storm preparedness, Barnett said.
In that process, the need for a tornado siren in the town was identified.
Rebecca Barnett of Elizabethtown, a Cummins employee and Fred Barnett’s wife, applied for an Indiana Department of Homeland Security grant and obtained nearly all the money for the $19,160 early warning system.
About $5,000 was raised through in-kind contributions.
