By day, Jay Winkel runs a lawn care and landscape maintenance business, by night he helps to warn Morton residents of potentially dangerous storms.
Winkel is one of the 16 Morton Police Auxiliary officers who also serve as storm spotters.
“Storm spotting is very dangerous and fascinating at the same time,” Winkel said. “I would not recommend chasing a storm under any circumstances or spotting any storms without having weather education. It should never be done alone.”
As volunteers, the auxiliary officers do not receive payment for these responsibilities.
Morton Police Chief Nick Graff said all members of the police auxiliary are trained by the national weather service at the Tazewell County ESDA Headquarters in Tremont. These classes, held each year in early March are open to the public, providing any interested person with information on storm spotting.
“The classes teach them how to recognize the beginnings of tornadoes and how to differentiate between clouds that are rotating and clouds that are not rotating,” Graff said.
Members of the auxiliary attend classes each year.
“The Morton Police Dept. provides pagers for all of us,” Winkel said. “We are paged any time a storm watch or warning is issued for Tazewell County.”
“They are positioned in various locations,” Graff added.
These positions are determined based on the location of the storm. Officers respond to their designated locations in a squad car or a personal vehicle.
After noticing rotation, Graff said a spotter contacts the department’s emergency operation center. Officials there contact the Tazewell County center, whose officials relay the information to the National Weather Service.
Graff said that the siren sounding does not always mean a tornado has been spotted in the area.
“It depends on the circumstance,” he said. “Sometimes we know storms are coming. Other times they just pop up. If we have spotters out during a warning and they don’t see anything, we don’t set the sirens off.”
However, Graff said that if rotation is spotted by somebody else in the community but spotters do not see anything, the siren is set off to be safe.
Graff said Morton’s siren was set off early one Monday morning in June after an East Peoria Police officer reported seeing a tornado at Springfield and Muller Roads.
“Our spotters didn’t see anything, and there ended up not being a tornado, but we set the sirens off just to be safe,” Graff said.
