AMESBURY — In a couple of weeks, residents within a 10-mile radius of Seabrook Station will hear a lunchtime siren noticeably different from last year's subtle screech.
Testing of nuclear power plant's sirens in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, including the 121 sirens located in Amesbury, Merrimac, Newbury, Newburyport, West Newbury and Salisbury, will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 12:30 p.m.
The annual test was prompted by a siren that went off unexpectedly in the Woodsom Farm area in 2007. Confused residents flooded 911 lines, and callers had to be diverted to dispatch centers in neighboring towns, but police were also unaware of what was wrong. The mass confusion prompted the town to lay on heavy advertising, including a townwide phone call from the mayor, for a siren testing the next year.
"When a siren accidentally went off a few years ago, people panicked," said Don Swenson, Amesbury's director of emergency management. "The goal of the test is to have citizens of all the different towns get used to what the siren is and how it sounds."
Because of the 2007 scare, New Hampshire Homeland Security and Emergency Management from New Hampshire and Massachusetts instituted a yearly test to familiarize residents with the sound and the emergency evacuation plan. Amesbury instituted a CodeRed emergency notification system, which allows the town to call 60,000 phone numbers per hour in the event of an emergency.
But unlike last year, Amesbury residents won't be warned of the testing with a prerecorded CodeRed emergency phone call by Mayor Thatcher Kezer.
"Last year was the first time the siren testing had been done in years, and we used that to test out the CodeRed system, which was new at the time, to see how the system worked," Kezer said, noting that the system is reserved for emergencies only.
In addition to receiving prerecorded CodeRed phone calls from the mayor, residents were also made aware of the testing through road signs and billboards and publicity through media outlets. Swenson said the bombardment of announcements last year was effective, as nobody from Amesbury called 911.
Swenson said that this year, he has sent e-mails to all the district's schools and department heads, alerting them of the testing, but most of the advertising for the event will be handled by Seabrook Station and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, which will be sending the information to media outlets and possibly putting signboards along interstates 495 and 95.
The first drill was held last year, but after a bombardment of announcements and alerts about the testing, many residents didn't believe the siren lived up to the hype, prompting Seabrook Station to change this year's demonstration.
"They're going to do the normal siren that they did last year, and then they're going to also do a new, high-low tone to see which one carries the best," Swenson said.
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