Oops! Orting Lahar Sirens Inadvertedly Go Off

ORTING - There are six sirens in Orting designed to scare people. At 8 a.m. Tuesday, two of them screamed.

Barista Michelle Jaeger was on duty at the espresso stand in downtown Orting: "It did. It scared me real bad. So I called the police and they told me they didn't know what was going on."

These are not just sirens. It's a lahar warning system.

Orting knows if Mt. Rainier goes... or a glacier tears loose, a 14 foot wall of mud (a lahar) could be on the way.

"I am pretty terrified to live in this town just 'cause of the whole mountain and everything that happens around here," said Orting resident Samantha Blakely. "It scares me."

It is for people like Samantha and the thousands of others that potentially live in the lahar zone that Pierce County and Orting put up sirens.

One of them is in Gene Curbow's backyard.

"It kept going off and kept going off. It would go three burps, stop and then 10 minutes later, it would have another three burps and stop."

While Curbow was counting burps. The schools evacuated. The corrugated paper plant down the street from his home closed.

At the espresso stand, Michelle Jaeger saw the traffic headed out of town: "I was almost crying actually. It was very scary, I was almost ready to start running."

But she couldn't leave, she was too busy.

"They even told me to hurry up. The lahar was coming and they needed their coffee."

It was a false alarm. The Pierce County Management Department says the sirens might have been accidentally triggered by a required monthly test of the Emergency Alert System. Technicians are looking into possible causes of the erroneous alarm, including programming or coding errors.

Authorities admit the system has fouled up a few times, but they say the fact it sounded shows it will be there when the town really needs it.

Critics say while they are at it. The city should turn up the volume. They say their ambulances are louder than the sirens.