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If the upgrade were to take place, if there were to be a warning for example in the Milton area, only Milton residents would hear a siren. Sirens would not be heard in other areas of the county unless absolutely warranted and the automated system was manually overridden by county staff.

Rock County Emergency Management Director Kevin Wernet said this is being looked at as a modernization project, being proposed in the county’s 2026 budget. The initial cost for installation would be about $530,000, with an ongoing annual cost of about $11,400 for cell service and a software subscription.

Wernet said the county is treading a fine line, now and going forward, between too little and too much use of the sirens.

“We don’t want to over-warn the public, but we want to make sure the sirens are functioning when we hit the sirens,” Wernet said.

Rock County’s current siren system is reliant on electricity. Wernet said the new system would rely on cell service and would be backed up by a battery. It would be automated, trimming off an estimated one minute to 90 seconds of time between the warning being issued and sirens being sounded. Under the current system, as warnings are issued, workers manually sound the sirens countywide.

Walworth County

Not all areas of Walworth County are covered by outdoor warning sirens, and the outdoor warning sirens are not owned or maintained by the county, according to information available on Walworth County’s website.

They are owned by individual municipalities and in some cases individual municipalities activate their own sirens. Other sirens are activated by the Walworth County Sheriff’s Office Communications Center.

As in other counties, Walworth County’s outdoor warning sirens are activated for tornado warnings and damaging winds greater than 80 mph.

Dane County

Dane County adopted a zoned approach more than two decades ago for its outdoor tornado warning sirens.

Initially, there were nine designated zones across the county. In 2012, it shifted to the National Weather Services’ “polygon” approach, in which sirens go off based on an area defined on a weather map as in the path of a severe storm.

In 2023, Dane County invested $3 million to further upgrade its outdoor warning system with improvements to hardware, software and radio equipment used to control the system, Beckett said.

Dane County’s sirens now sound automatically when the National Weather Service issues a tornado warning in a specific geographical zone. Dane County also sounds its zoned sirens for severe thunderstorm warnings with destructive winds.

“As long (the storm) is within 1.3 miles of the siren, it will be activated,” said Andrew Beckett, emergency communications and outreach manager for Dane County Emergency Management.

Jefferson County

According to a spokesperson at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Dispatch Center, Jefferson County’s outdoor tornado warning sirens are not zoned.

As is currently the case in Rock County, the sirens sound throughout the county when a tornado or warning is issued most anywhere in the county. However, the county does not sound sirens in the cities of Fort Atkinson or Watertown; those are activated by those cities’ dispatch centers. The county also does not sound sirens for severe thunderstorm warnings with destructive winds.