(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- The National Weather Service says it was an EF1 tornado that touched down in Waukegan Tuesday evening and flipped a car and did damage with winds up to 90 miles an hour. Some are asking: Why didn't the sirens go off?
Waukegan's fire marshal, Steven Lenzi, said Wednesday the siren system was tested just hours before the tornado touched down, and the test showed everything was working.
Then, at about 6:40 p.m., the actual tornado arrived. One person was injured.
"The system would automatically go into an alert should the National Weather Service put us under a specific condition. So, that condition gets alerted by the National Weather Service and immediately those sirens would go off. That did not occur in this instance,” Lenzi said.
In other words, the NWS did not issue a warning. NWS Meteorologist Lee Carlaw said part of the reason is the conditions changed so quickly.
“Our radar has a hard time detecting those changing velocities of winds in the storm. And unfortunately, that's one of those situations where we're not able to get lead time -- in a tornado warning -- to alert individuals of the rapidly developing threat."
Carlaw said the system is limited by the curvature of the Earth and the nature of Doppler radar. The limitations are "compounded and magnified when you're talking about the very small storms that we had" on Tuesday, Carlaw said.