When new Kingfisher County Emergency Management Director Ryan Deatherage and Fire Chief Ryan Gibson set out to determine the status of the city’s storm sirens, the results were…. alarming.

“Chief Gibson and I have been very proactive,” Deatherage said at a recent Kingfisher Lions Club meeting. “When we took over, one of the first things we did was physically check out each one of the sirens.

“We have been finding problems.”

Of the six sirens within the city limits, only two were working.

The best of the bunch is located just west of the school’s track on 13th Street.

The only other one working during those tests was near the water tower at Meeker Addition.

“It is working halfway,” Deatherage said. “It works. You can hear it.

“But it is not nearly as loud as it needs to be.”

Sirens not working were at the county fairgrounds, between Admire and Miles near Seventh Street (behind City Cafe), on the cellular tower at Pioneer Telephone headquarters (Robberts and Sixth) and near the city’s Street Department building near Bowman and Third.

Some may be able to be fixed. “When the power goes out at the fairgrounds, it throws that breaker,” Deatherage said. “We were hoping that’s what that was. When we checked it one day we were able to throw the breaker and it worked. Two days later, it didn’t.”

Any fixes will be temporary, Deatherage said. Or, as he called them “Band-Aid fixes.”

“Most of these systems we have right now are about 30 years old,” he said. “They are ‘lifed out.’” Essentially one person in the city can repair those that can be fixed and that’s only if parts can be found.

Deatherage sought out a quote to replace the six sirens…and it’s costly.

It came in at more than $216,000 to purchase the equipment and have it installed.

That doesn’t include the two sirens north of Kingfisher (at Cimarron Electric and another near P&K Equipment) that also didn’t work.

Deatherage said the decision to replace the sirens does not belong to his office.

“I am a county emergency management director. We are a contracting agency to the city of Kingfisher,” he said. “It will be up to the city to decide if they can afford it.”

The two north of town will be decided by county commissioners, he said.

There could be options to help cover some of those costs, but it could also take time, he added.

Deatherage’s office is currently updating the county’s Hazard Mitigation Plan and included in it is applying for a grant to replace the sirens.

But that means federal dollars going through the state and eventually the state saying the money is available…whenever that may be, Deatherage said.

“We basically have to take that plan and lay it on the shelf. When the state says they have money to fund that, then they can fund that,” he told Lions Club members.

He said city commissioners will have the information available to them at future meetings to decide if they want to wait on a possible grant, move forward with new sirens now or continue to maintain the current system.

“That will depend on what the city decides to do,” Deatherage said. “I can’t dictate that.”