Feeling Safer Yet?
May 27th, 2005 at 10:48 am by Susie
Oh. Well, we weren’t actually going to tell anyone when there was an emergency, anyway. Wouldn’t want people to panic:
More than two dozen nuclear power plants across the country lack sirens that would warn of a nuclear emergency if electricity also was blacked out, according to a report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.Twenty-eight U.S. plants lack backup power for sirens that are supposed to alert residents in a 10-mile radius of trouble, the NRC said. Seventeen plants have full backup for the systems, while 18 others have at least some sirens that would remain operable during an outage.
Do you ever hear the Limerick siren tests? Bensalem’s a lot more than 10 miles from Limerick, but in your travels you may have heard them. First Monday of every month from 2:00 pm to 2:03 pm.
Here’s a fun thing to consider: what if something happens during a test? Would they keep the sirens going longer than the normal 3 minutes? Would people assume it was just a siren malfunction?