County wide siren activation for sliver of county tornado warned?

A line of strong storms went through the area Friday night, June 5, 2026, and while most of the activity stayed below severe thresholds, one storm showed significant rotation, prompting a tornado warning.

The storm first went tornado warned at 9:01 p.m. in southern Green Lake County as it traveled to the southeast at 20 mph.

This eventually tracked the storm, along with persistent rotation, into Dodge County, just barely clipping extreme southwest Fond du Lac County to the south and west of Waupun.

Because that little bit of the county was warned, protocol dictates that the entire county’s siren system be activated.

At least one report of a funnel cloud was reported and another resident in the area filmed what appeared to be stout funnel cloud, but as of Saturday morning, no reports of damage has been reported.

The warning prompted lots of questions from residents throughout Fond du Lac County that were wondering why their town’s sirens were going off if the warning wasn’t directly effecting their area.

For years this was just the way things worked. The sirens were manually activated by dispatchers in the communications center anytime a tornado warning was issued anywhere in the county.

In 2020, desperately needed software was developed that read where the warning polygon was issued and only the sirens in that warning area would be automatically activated and things were well. Until…

During a July 28th, 2021 storm, a tornado warning was issued for part of Fond du Lac County.

The software malfunctioned and none of the county’s sirens were activated.

So the Emergency Manager at that time made the decision that until confidence could be placed in the automatic system that a malfunction wouldn’t happen, the county would go back to the manual triggering of all sirens during a warning.

While it is possible for dispatchers to study the tornado warning location and activate only those sirens, it would take minutes to do in a situation where seconds could count. So for the time being, we are back to a county wide siren system.