Upgrades to San Francisco’s emergency outdoor warning system keep getting delayed while the price continues to skyrocket. Meanwhile, emergency responders are tasked with physically going to Ocean Beach to alert residents about tsunami warnings.
It’s been three years since SFist’s last post on the topic, so it’s that time again when we ask, “Remember the Tuesday noon siren? And is it ever coming back?”
Last December, the Chronicle wrote that the December 5 tsunami warning prompted Supervisor Peskin to stress the importance of completing the upgrade to San Francisco’s emergency outdoor warning system, which was taken offline for upgrades in 2019 due to cybersecurity concerns.
It was revealed in the same Chronicle article that London Breed's office had determined the whole system actually needed to be replaced, which was projected to cost around $20 million. An upgrade of the old system was projected to be around $3 million back in 2022. It’s also unclear whether Mayor Lurie is interested in pursuing the upgrade, as he declined to comment on the Chronicle article.
According to ABC7, during a tsunami warning in January 2022, first responders had to physically go out to Ocean Beach with loudspeakers to alert residents. That said, the Department of Emergency Management said that they wouldn’t have activated the sirens for that particular tsunami anyway, which was considered low risk.
While many residents use AlertSF for their emergency notifications, as of ABC7’s article post date in February 2024, only 195,000 people out of more than 800,000 residents were signed up. While Emergency Management says they can also push alerts to residents who haven’t opted in, cell phones aren’t always the most reliable means of communication in an emergency.
For anyone unfamiliar, up until San Francisco’s outdoor warning system was taken offline, the city tested its 119 1940s-era sirens every Tuesday at lunchtime, blasting them across city intersections. Back in 2009, this author featured a short documentary by SF72 starring Cesar Santos, who read the accompanying weekly announcement at the time. (We even remembered Santos’s name 16 years later. That’s how much we liked this video.)
The system was taken offline in 2019 after an incident in Dallas raised concerns — hackers managed to activate all 156 sirens and blast them in 15 90-second intervals over the course of a weekend, according to SFGate. The incident prompted San Francisco officials to take the system offline while they upgraded it, which was initially supposed to take two years, until COVID hit, and here we are.
In a recent Reddit thread pondering when and if the siren will return, one user recalls their coworkers referring to the siren as the "Taco Tuesday Alarm," and another remembers their boss using the siren as a way to remind the staff it’s time for the weekly staff meeting, as if Cesar Santos himself was beckoning them to the conference room.
Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
