Residents near the West Cobb Aquatic Center reported hearing sounds from a tornado siren late Saturday night into Sunday morning. This happened despite the fact no severe weather was reported in the area.

The Emergency Management department asked Cobb EMC turn off power to the siren, but that operation took several hours.

Cobb Emergency Management has tested the system and found the siren on Macland Road had a low battery condition. The system silently tests each siren every day, but when the low batteries prevented the test it resulted in “thumping” sounds coming out of the siren. That continued as the system attempted to complete the silent test. The system will be tested again today.

Normally these issues are discovered during the monthly test of the sirens. However, those tests were suspended during the pandemic. To run a complete system diagnostic and to prevent a recurrence of this situation, the monthly siren tests will resume in July.