Siren failures frustrating nuclear plants' owner

WHITE PLAINS-The latest failure of the sirens that are meant to signal an emergency at the Indian Point nuclear plants had county officials hopping mad and the plant owner saying, "We don't blame them." A test Sept. 14 of the 156 sirens in Westchester, Rockland, Orange and Putnam counties resulted in two sirens failing to sound, a computer problem that seemed to indicate more sirens going bad and the complete failure of one backup system. The problems - following several other siren failures this summer - prompted Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano to renew his demand that the plants be closed. "How many times does the system have to fail before immediate action is taken?" he asked. "My job is to keep Westchester residents safe and secure, and this becomes harder with a siren system that lacks credibility." Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef said, "You've got to notify the public, and you can't fool around with it.... It's just so frustrating." Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Nuclear Northeast, owner of the two plants in Buchanan, said, "The counties aren't satisfied, and we don't blame them." He said that while Entergy had already pledged to replace the sirens with a state-of-the-art system within two years, "We'd like to shorten that." The Wednesday problems are "another illustration of why we made that commitment," he said. The first test conducted was of a backup system, which is supposed to activate the sirens with a radio signal. None of Rockland's 51 sirens responded, Steets said, although the other three counties' sirens worked. "We believe it was a problem in the centralized computer software," he said. When the primary system was used, Rockland's sirens worked, but two in Tarrytown, in Westchester, did not. And the computer readouts seen by the counties' emergency workers seemed to show several more sirens failing, although they actually sounded, Steets said. In an actual emergency, if county workers believed the sirens did not go off, they would have to go to alternate methods of informing residents of the emergency, ranging from telephone calls to bullhorns. Steets said Entergy was trying to convince the counties that the readouts were false negatives and that it was the software, not the sirens, that were at fault. But not everyone was convinced. "Entergy says one thing, the four counties say another," Spano said. In July, 20 of the sirens were knocked out by a thunderstorm about a week after the entire system went down for nearly six hours when power was lost to a signal transmitter. Steets said the test was unrelated to the current visit by Department of Homeland Security staffers who are reviewing plant security and emergency planning at all the nation's nuclear plants.