Siren Testing Planned for Tuesday Around Peach Bottom

By Elizabeth Janney

Sirens will be going off Tuesday around Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Delta, PA, and they may be heard in Harford County.

“We do not want to cause unnecessary alarm to our citizens,” Harford County Emergency Manager Richard Ayers said in a prepared statement. “However, the testing of the siren system is necessary and is being done in the interest of public safety."

In accordance with FEMA regulations, Peach Bottom will sound a three-minute alarm every one-and-a-half hours beginning at 8 a.m., according to Harford County Emergency Services. The test is scheduled to repeat six times.

The exercise is to ensure that a new siren system, installed by Exelon Power, is functional. The system includes 97 outdoor sirens that will work in an electrical outage through a battery-powered backup system, according to Exelon. The new sirens have been installed in a 10-mile warning zone around Peach Bottom's campus along the Conowingo in a siren replacement project that Exelon says it began in May 2012 and which it plans to complete by the end of 2013.

County emergency management agencies plan to use the warning sirens to notify citizens of an emergency, although Harford County officials emphasized that Tuesday's test was just an exercise and not cause for alarm.

According to Exelon, its siren system has never been used to alert citizens of an incident at Peach Bottom but has been employed by local governments to communicate to citizens in severe weather events.