Wayne County failed to install enough warning sirens in Dearborn.

On Saturday at 1 p.m., Dearborn will conduct its monthly test of its early warning sirens.

Trouble is, if you’re inside your home or in certain parts of the city, you’ll never hear them.

That’s because unbeknownst to Dearborn city leaders, Wayne County disconnected all 28 of Dearborn’s “older” but still-working sirens and installed just 12 new ones to cover the same geographic area.

Dearborn Mayor John B. O’Reilly says the county’s decision to make the change was never communicated to his administration. However, when the first tests were conducted, it was pretty clear to all that something had changed.

“When they did the test, we couldn’t hear them the sirens as well. They left some coverage holes in the city,” O’Reilly said. “It was poorly handled by Wayne County in terms of notice.”

Wayne County has now agreed to install four more swivel head sirens in the city to improve the coverage area. It isn’t yet clear if that will be sufficient. O’Reilly said if it isn’t, Dearborn can install more sirens on its own.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Last year, the city announced that a new state-of-the art siren system was installed at a cost of $250,000, purchased with grant funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security via Wayne County.

Dearborn was one of several communities in Wayne County to get the new siren system. A key feature of the new systems is that they are interoperable. This means that emergency management centers in different Wayne County communities can activate each other’s sirens remotely, if a center in one community were damaged in a tornado or other disaster.  The new system was even touted as being louder, but it isn’t.

O’Reilly said the city’s old system of 28 sirens, still in perfect working order, was designed to emit sounds loud enough for people to hear even while inside their homes. And Dearborn’s older siren system, installed more than 20 years ago, was laid out in such a way to overlap sections of the city to ensure all residents could hear the sirens.

The new siren system doesn’t provide overlapping coverage and is designed to be heard only if you are outside. The sirens are designed to swivel and Wayne County officials were convinced that feature alone would allow them to reduce by more than half the number of new sirens to install.

“Wayne County’s goals and our goals were very different,” O’Reilly said. “The county wanted the most coverage per unit we thought it was better to overlap (sirens) to get better coverage. The county’s coverage was more marginal.”

Luckily, Dearborn doesn’t rely on sirens alone to notify residents of an emergency. In addition to cable TV, Dearborn has an emergency system in place that can telephone all homes automatically. In addition, Dearborn is working on a new system that could call cellular phones, too. Residents would have to register their cell phone number with the city of Dearborn to receive that service.

“Sirens, while still important, are not the principal way to get to people in an emergency,” O’Reilly said.