[buckeye1996]

My family and I just moved to Newtown. Are there tornado sirens in this area? We are coming from Ohio. Just want to make sure we know what they are when they go off (hopefully, never!)

[JViello]

Nope...no need really. There are air raid sirens though. lol

[KH02]

No because we rarely get tornadoes and when we do they are fairly minor considering the ones in the plains region.
You just simply see it on the news or radio...

[renovating]

Originally Posted by KH02

No because we rarely get tornadoes

They seem to be occurring more frequently in CT if this past summer is any indicator. Westport, Easton and Bridgeport all had reported tornados this summer.

[Kristin85]

No tornado sirens but you may hear flood warning sirens (which could sound similar.) I lived across the street from a river as a kid and a flood siren would go off once or twice a year when horrendous storms came through town.

[Lowerdeck]

Down in North Grosvenordale, there's a siren which goes off down by the fire station at Noon. I'm not sure what other purpose this would serve.

Tornadoes are rarer and weaker around here. The most notable ones this year have been in Bristol and Bridgeport - both EF1's and short lived. You hear the tornado warnings on TV, the major stations (3, 8, 30) switch over to weather alert mode. You are more likely to see damage from straight line winds than tornadoes in stronger thunderstorms - like what happened in Westport and Easton earlier this summer.

[AnonChick]

We do get tornados but they're weaker, as mentioned. Part of the reason for this is less open spaces than in Ohio. Think of it as a bumperpool game, with the tornado as the ball. It has to get momentum to get strong. If it bumps into something, that "something" will certainly feel it, but it'll also weaken the momentum of the ball and cause it to slow its spinning. The slower it spins, the weaker the next bump until eventually it just fizzles out.

What happened in Hamden in 1989, was a freaky situation. The tornados came down Whitney Avenue, which is more or less a very long, very wide, very straight main town road with lots of side streets. They ricocheted off a swathe of houses on a couple of the sidestreets but otherwise just kept going straight. This was a series of 17 tornados that ripped through the southeast corridor, some of them one right after the other, some side-by-side, a couple on top of each other.

The damage was mindboggling for our area; several streets were decimated, and others were just house after house after house of completely missing roofs. I was driving on Whitney at the Cheshire side of it when it happened. I pulled into Wentworth's Ice Cream just as the tail end of one of the bigger tornados blew past, carrying a couple of trees with it. Weirdest thing I ever saw in my life.

[andthentherewere3]

I have to agree that the tornadoes here are much weaker. I grew up in tornado alley with tornado sirens, and lived through several tornadoes. In schools when the town tornado siren goes off, students are hustled into hallways and fall into what's almost a fetal position on the floor, very scary to children. As a young child I was in a car that was flipped over in a tornado. I don't really get worked up now when I hear there is a tornado warning in Ct. Sure, there might be damage, but I am not in fear of my life like I might be if I heard a tornado siren in other parts of the country. Actually, I miss the wild weather.

[JViello]

buckeye1996: Just to put things in perspective, what everyone is talking about are very rare and mostly just strong thunderstorms that happen to spawn a funnel for a very short period.

We had some quick, and I do mean quick (10-15 seconds) tornado's this year and last year. Before that, IIRC it was 1989 when the last one hit sporadically so it's not like the Midwest in that regard where this monster hits the ground and goes for a long ride.

As for the sirens we do have, they are indeed air raid sirens left over from another era. Many towns use them as sentinals. The town of Prospect for instance gives one short "wail" at 6pm everyday. It's actually kind of nice because it gives everyone in town a "reference" of time and gives kids no excuse to not be home for dinner.