Siren, phone test yields mixed results

SITKA, ALASKA
Authorities say when the tsunami sirens are tested, the phones at the police department start ringing. This time around, more people were aware what was going on.

“That’s an indicator to us that we were reaching out to folks,” police Chief Sheldon Schmitt said.

And that’s what all of this is about, he says: getting the word out, whether it’s an emergency or not, about why the sirens are going off. One of the ways police plan to do that in the future is using a phone system that can call multiple phone numbers in Sitka at once, and deliver a pre-recorded message.

That system, called CodeRED, was also tested last week. Schmitt says his staff learned a lot during that test, including the fact that some of the phone numbers it has on file are no longer valid.

“Another problem that we had, at least on the first go-around, was that we kind of overwhelmed the local phone utility,” Schmitt said.

Authorities tried 1,500 calls per minute on the first test, and the system didn’t cooperate. For the second test, they tried 485 calls per minute. Schmitt says there are about 5,000 numbers to call in Sitka, so complete notification of the whole community would take about 10 minutes.

“That’s exactly why you have the drills, is to identify problems or things you can do better,” he said. “Certainly, that’s true in this case. We can do better. But actually, it worked pretty well, considering how many people it’s notifying at one time.”

CodeRED is new to Sitka, but the tsunami sirens are not. At least, some of them aren’t. The city is in the process of replacing the sirens. You might have noticed them popping up around town. They look like big round discs at the top of a pole.

“I thought maybe, like, six spaceships stacked on top of each other,” fire Chief Dave Miller said.

The test showed everything was working, he said, but the new sirens played the clocktower chime instead of the typical wailing noise.

“Which was fine,” he added. “It showed that they’re working. And then we set off the old siren system and it worked fine. We were covering the same amount of area that we would have two years ago, plus the chimes were out there and made more noise, too.”

The old siren system, he says, used to have trouble reaching certain places in Sitka, such as up the Indian River Valley. The new sirens have a bigger range, and now everyone in town should be able to hear something.

Police and fire officials both say they’re hoping to have another test in the near future.