Let us start with the lesson, perhaps: Don’t use a tsunami siren to warn about gusty winds.
Fire officials in Depoe Bay, along the central Oregon coast, said Saturday that they had been flooded with calls “of concern and panic” after the city activated its emergency tsunami sirens to alert residents to a forthcoming high wind watch.
“This was apparently an alert for the anticipated weather system approaching us,” Depoe Bay Fire Chief Bryan Daniels wrote on Facebook. “There is no tsunami threat to Depoe Bay or properties within the district.”
Wind gusts hit 84 mph at Cape Perpetua and Cape Foulweather, 75 mph at the Yaquina Bay Bridge and 55 mph at the Newport Airport.
Residents and visitors described a state of discombobulated alarm after the sirens began howling.
A visitor, Leah Godfrey, said she sprinted to her car after hearing the sirens sound. “Please reserve the doomsday siren for actual doomsday,” she wrote on Facebook.
One Depoe Bay resident, DeAnne Haubner Norton, wrote: “Are we going to have an alert every time the wind gets a bit blustery? If we do that every time, a real threat will come along and every one will ignore it.”
“We look forward to partnering with the City of Depoe Bay to avoid hysteria in the future,” Daniels wrote on Facebook.
Depoe Bay installed its tsunami sirens in 2013. Extensive parts of the city sit in the tsunami inundation zone in the case of a major Cascadia subduction zone earthquake.