At 8:40 a.m. Tsunami Warning alerts interrupted what otherwise would have been a quiet summer Thursday morning on the Kenai Peninsula on cell phones, radio, and television stations throwing residents in the coastal communities of Resurrection Bay and Kachemak Bay into a panic wondering if they should run for higher ground. At issue, however, is that there was no tsunami warning. Some are calling it a technical error, including the U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center, which called the alert ‘erroneous’, leading to sirens going off in the Kenai Peninsula coastal communities of Seward, Homer, and Kodiak.
There is NO TSUNAMI threat for Alaska. We are aware of an erroneous tsunami warning that is leading to sirens sounding in some communities. Please disregard; we have not issued a tsunami warning. NWS is reviewing this incident.
-DS
— NWS Tsunami Alerts (@NWS_NTWC) June 2, 2022
Brenda Ahlberg, Emergency Manager with the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management tells KSRM:
“Well, we’re working with the state and weather service now to determine the cause. The Borough did not activate the system and I think the biggest thing that I want folks to know is that we needed to confirm that this was not a real-world activation before we released the all clear. The Borough did not activate the sirens, however, the Borough did activate the all clear. We did two all clears.”
Ahlberg talks through the process of how an activation happens:
“When there is a Tsunami Warning that is released by the National Weather Service, then that activates our siren system once. Then, after that, the Borough does manual activations. So, we set a timer like every five minutes, we’ll set the alarms again so that people can hear then and can act accordingly and get to high ground for their own safety. Through the course of that warning period as the warning, then, is modified to lower status and eventually to an all clear, once it becomes an all clear by the National Weather Service, then the Borough will release its all-clear signals through the messaging through the sirens. That’s the normal process now.”
According to Mark Roberts, Alaska State Emergency Operations Center Manager with the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, during routine monthly testing of the National Tsunami Warning System, the National Weather Forecast Office in Anchorage inadvertently transmitted the test to eight NOAA Weather Radio towers, which automatically triggered tsunami sirens in areas of the Kenai Peninsula Borough and activated some Emergency Alert Systems that were monitoring NOAA Weather Radio as a source.
The Kenai Peninsula Borough’s Office of Emergency Management says that they did not activate the sirens, but they did activate the all clear. The National Weather Service is in the process of reviewing the incident.