The phones wouldn’t stop ringing. Local Facebook pages lit up. There were even reports of a couple of people driving around with bullhorns, trying to warn their neighbors.
The blaring warnings at Seabrook Station nuclear power plant turned out to be a false alarm, but police chiefs in towns along the New Hampshire coast described several tense minutes on July 12 as they waited for news, and the CEO of the plant’s parent company said different stakeholders received information at different times.
The false alarm at Seabrook Station has raised questions about how the plant communicates with local and state officials and has raised again the issue of false information spreading on social media faster than official sources can counter it.
“There was a period of time when we were completely in the dark,” said North Hampton Police Department Chief Kathryn Mone.
Alerts started sounding on nine of the more than 120 emergency sirens in the region just after 10:50 a.m., according to an event notification report filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The notification stated “local authorities” were notified of the accidental sirens, but no announcement about the event was planned at the outset.
Mone said the all-clear arrived from the state emergency management division at 11:24 a.m.
In between, she said, there were a few minutes of pandemonium as frantic residents called the police to figure out what to do.
“When we first started getting the phone calls, we had no idea if it was an emergency or not,” Mone said. “We were completely in the dark.”
A message from the state, acknowledging the alarms and making it clear there was no emergency, was a relief. Many people in the area received notifications on their cellphones explaining the false alarm around noon, but not all received the messages at the same time.
Officials from Seabrook Station issued a statement later the same day explaining the alarms sounded during a test of the plant’s emergency response systems.
Mixed messaging
With just nine of the more than 120 emergency alert speakers within 10 miles of the plant sounding that day, different towns experienced the day differently.
The 10-mile radius around Seabrook Station is part of what’s called the “emergency management zone,” which would be in the most danger in case of an emergency at the nuclear plant.
Responses to the false alarm varied widely across the zone, which encompasses 23 towns in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
In Hampton, Police Chief David Hobbs estimated he waited only about six or seven minutes between the time he was informed that alarms were sounding and getting confirmation from the Rockingham County emergency services dispatch that there was no problem at the plant.
Police used their social media pages to post that the alarms were false.
“The biggest problem was people trying to spread the word who didn’t have actual information,” said North Hampton’s Mone.
Further inland, where sirens and warnings did not sound, police chiefs said they barely noticed the false alarm.
“From my perspective, there wasn’t a lot of public alarm in Brentwood,” said that town’s police chief, David Hickey, though he saw a lot of nervousness from towns on the coast. “Our Facebook page didn’t light up. We didn’t field a lot of calls.”
Hickey said he learned about the alarm first from friends on other police departments before hearing from Rockingham County Dispatch that the alarm was false.
Hickey said he thought communication was good, but said there are always lessons to learn.
“If we don’t learn from this, then we do have a problem,” he said.
Communication probed
U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen wrote to NextEra Energy, the parent company of Seabrook Station, two days after the sirens sounded, asking about the flow of information.
Responding to Shaheen, NextEra CEO John Ketchum said the company was investigating how the alarms were set off.
“We are also committed to enhancing our notification and communication to state and local agencies,” Ketchum wrote.
“While proactive communications were distributed within minutes of the incident, including those to state officials and the NRC (U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission), the timing of the communications was not consistent across all of our stakeholders and the public.”
A spokesman for NextEra said the company likely would release more information about what happened in early August.
