City prepared for storms
The city was prepared for the severe thunderstorms and potential tornado threat on Friday, according to city officials.
City Administrator Phillip Patterson said the city’s performance improved overall since the last round of severe weather hit in October. At 3:17 p.m., seven of the eight sirens sounded, alerting the city of the severe weather, he said. The eighth siren is the one at the airport which was damaged by a tornado in October. Patterson said the city is expecting the new siren to be delivered in a month.
Staff was monitoring the weather at the police and fire department and everyone was in communication with each other on Friday, Patterson said. The city’s response time was better during this emergency, he said.
The National Weather Service (NWS) in Tulsa, Okla., issued a tornado warning for southwestern Benton County at 3:12 p.m. according to Pete Snyder, a meteorologist for the NWS. The alert also included Delaware County and northern Adair County in Oklahoma, Snyder said.
The NWS radar did indicate a rotation in the clouds, however, it did not form into a tornado, Snyder said. It is possible the rotation did not touch down or may have touched down for a moment and lifted back up, Snyder said.
The thunderstorms moved at 45 miles per hour and produced winds in excess of 60 miles an hour, according to Snyder. When the storms arrived in Siloam Springs, winds were calculated at 40 to 50 miles per hour, he said. The storms and rotation were caused by a powerful cold front which pushed against a warm mass, he said.
“Storms like this can occur anytime of the year, though you don’t see it in January usually,”
Snyder said.
The city did not receive any damage from the storm, according to Holland Hayden, city communications manager. Two households were without power for about an hour when lightning struck an arrester on Sawmill Road, Hayden said. Hayden described an arrester as a piece of equipment designed to take a lightning strike and disconnect the ground wire as opposed to the primary or secondary wires. If the lightning had struck something else on the pole the outages would have been more extensive, she said. A traffic light at Progress Avenue and Tahlequah Street was also out for about an hour, Hayden said.
The storm led to students in the Siloam Springs School District being held in school until the danger passed, according Superintendent Jody Wiggins.
When the warning was issued, the buses were running routes and had already picked up children from Northside Elementary, Southside Elementary and the middle school, he said. The buses arrived at the intermediate school when the sirens sounded and all of the children were evacuated from the buses and held at the intermediate school until the danger passed, approximately 30 to 40 minutes, Wiggins said.
The city had planned to hold Family Game Night at the Siloam Springs Community Building that evening, but postponed the event until Jan. 31 because of the storm activity, according to a Facebook message from the Parks and Recreation Department. The library closed early at 5 p.m. and postponed movie night due to the weather, according to a Facebook post from the Siloam Springs Public Library.