False tornado siren finds flaw in the system

The Fire Chief discovers a coding mistake is to blame for the city's recent false-alarm tornado siren.

Chief Dennis Jenkerson says that while trying to pause this Monday's monthly drill due to rain moving through, his team inadvertently triggered a flaw that the siren system's creator had never seen before. "When we talked to the programmer yesterday, who was the main programmer on this software, and we walked through and he was able to get every keystroke we made in the computer system and we made them right. He didn't know what we had done. We had found a loophole in his program."

Jenkerson says the software designer is now working to patch that loophole to ensure a manual cancellation fully clears the queue in the future.

The Chief, speaking to aldermen, also highlighted a major financial win for his department, reporting a 7 million dollar increase in federal E.M.S. reimbursement funds that'll be used to upgrade life-saving equipment and ambulances.