Weather Sirens
A weather warning siren is located in the downtown shopping district at City Hall. The weather siren is used only for tornado warnings. It is tested at noon every Saturday during the spring and summer months. If you hear the siren at any other time, take cover immediately as a tornado has been spotted moving towards the Oconomowoc area.

Severe Weather Alerts
You can obtain severe weather alerts by going to www.mystateusa.com/ and click on the sign up for weather alerts in the upper right hand corner of the page. 

Programming of Weather Radio
The National Weather Service Site (www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/indexnw.htm) has a great deal of information about weather radios and programming them. If you “Google” to “Weather Radio S.A.M.E. codes” it will take you to the site as well.

The Specific Area Message Encoding (“S.A.M.E.”) codes allow you to tailor your weather radio to receive information from just the counties you specify by the county code you enter in your weather radio receiver. Below are the most common S.A.M.E. codes for our area:

COUNTY                                   S.A.M.E. Code

Waukesha                                      055133                                      


Additional adjacent Counties:

Walworth                                        055127
                                     
Washington                                    055134

Milwaukee                                      055079

Jefferson                                        055055

Dodge                                           055027

Follow the directions that come with your radio for programming your specific make and model of weather radio. Citizens should enter the S.A.M.E. code for the county they live in first. Then the S.A.M.E. code for the county immediately to the west and south west, followed by the S.A.M.E .code for the county to the north and northwest.

Remember that most severe weather usually approaches from the southwest and moves northeast. Program your S.A.M.E. codes to reflect that.

Remember that severe weather can and does approach from ANY direction too, but from the southwest is most common.

Recommendation is to not program too many county codes into your radio (no more than three) so as to not overload your radio when multi-county warnings occur.

ABOVE ALL, WHEN A WARNING IS RECEIVED, TAKE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY!

A “TORNADO WARNING” = TAKE COVER NOW!