ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Emergency sirens are everywhere across southeast Michigan.
They are the loudest way to know something bad is coming, often a tornado or severe thunderstorm.
But it’s 2026, and new technology is changing the way we think of emergency alerts, and the city of Ann Arbor could be looking for a way to make them a thing of the past.
“Over the next three years, we have to invest $180,000 in our current outdoor warning siren system,” Sydney Parmenter, Ann Arbor’s Director of Emergency Management, said on Wednesday. “So, that was really an opportunity for us to open a conversation with the community.”
Ann Arbor has joined cities like Detroit and Warren – along with Oakland County, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan – in creating a system that will send alerts directly to people’s cell phones.
They are currently conducting a survey to see if the sirens are still needed.
“We have our A-2 Emergency Alert Systems, which is an opt-in system. You can select whether you want to receive those via phone call, text, or email, and that’s a system that the City oversees,” Parmenter said. “The other system is the wireless emergency alert system, and that is the system that most folks interact with, that with an Amber Alert.”
It’s similar to the ones that the National Weather Service and FEMA have been sending since 2012.
Those alert people to major disasters such as storms, earthquakes, and mass shootings.
“We would not be having this conversation if the National Weather Service hadn’t started using that system to notify communities during a tornado warning or a severe thunderstorm warning,” Parmenter said. “I was at a wedding in Oakland County a couple of years ago, and our wireless emergency alert was issued for a tornado warning.
“All 200 cell phones went off,” Parmenter said, “and that grabbed our attention immediately, and were able to seek shelter.”
The outdoor sires are omnipresent throughout southeast Michigan.
There are 22 in Ann Arbor, 54 in Detroit, and 275 in Oakland County, which oversees all the sirens across the county’s municipalities.
All of them go off for various reasons.
For example, sirens usually go off for tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, but in Dearborn, they also go off for heavy snowfall.
And as loud as they are, they can’t be heard everywhere.
“If you’re indoors, when there’s an emergency, you may not hear the sirens,” Parmenter said. “If it’s in the middle of the night, the sirens are not designed to wake folks up.”
If Ann Arbor were to ditch the sirens, that process would take time and be done in stages, and they wouldn’t be the first in the state, as Kalamazoo got rid of them a few years ago.
Parmenter says she has been getting positive feedback from residents and noted that most want a combination of the old-school outdoor sirens and push alerts to their phones.
“This is step one, and we’re just getting that community feedback,” she said. “Then we would certainly start to build a plan from there.
“I know in Kalamazoo that they decommissioned theirs several years ago,” she added. “And nationally, we’re seeing a lot of bigger cities move in that direction. It worked for their community, and we’re just trying to assess whether it works for ours.
To sign up for the A2 Emergency alerts in Ann Arbor
To sign up for the Emergency Alerts in Detroit(you must be a city resident).