WINTER HAVEN, Fla. — If you’re visiting one of winter havens recreational facilities you might hear sirens go off, that’s because the city is testing out its newly installed lightning alert system.
Safety is always top of mind when Lynn Marshall takes her daughters and nieces to Winter Haven’s Rowdy Gaines Pool.
She’s happy to hear that the city is also making outdoor safety a priority.
“I think that’s really important not just to our community but in general. As a parent i want to know when it’s safe for them to be outdoors, when it’s safe for them to be in the pool,” said Marshall.
The City of Winter Haven just installed a new lightning alert system.
The system has been placed downtown, outside the Florida Citrus Building and the AdventHealth Fieldhouse and Conference Center which is home to the public pool and future baseball fields.
It features multi-directional sirens and a dual-color omni-directional beacon.
“When there’s a lightning strike we get notification within 60 seconds of that strike, it activates the horns and we can notify the kids in the pool,” said Scott Eilers, Assistant Director for Parks, Recreation & Culture.
Florida is the lightning capital of the United States. City leaders said the goal is to alert residents of a threat and for people to take shelter indoors.
“We are very prone to lightning. In the average summer months, two, three, four times a week we get people out of the pool and direct them to safe space,” Eilers said.
The City is testing out the lightning alert system every Thursday in June, between noon and 1:00 p.m.
The system will take the guess work out and allow people to get to a secure location quickly.
“Everybody thinks that it has to be cloudy and looks really bad when the first strike comes and that's not the case,” Eilers said. “The first strike can be miles in front of the storm and the last strike can be miles behind the storm and we want to protect against those situations.”
The City has plans to expand the lightning alert system to the Winter Haven Recreational & Culture Center and other high-traffic outdoor sites.
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