Longtime residents of San Francisco noticed something missing from the city's emergency response to Thursday's tsunami warning after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake off the Northern California coast: the old system of emergency sirens were silent.
While some people along Ocean Beach in San Francisco heard fire engines with lights and sirens, most people in the city only got the alert of a tsunami warning on their phones and moved to higher ground.
Ocean Beach resident Craig Malaer said the cell phone warnings did startle his kids at school, but the old sirens would have had a different response.
"It's called an S-horn in other commercial industrial areas. The S-horn means, drop everything and leave," Malaer said, mentioning that the horn used to be tested at noon every so often.
San Francisco's network of more than 100 old horns has been offline since 2019. They were supposed to be upgraded, but city crews soon found major problems to their functionality and condition.
"It's more than just the technology that needs to be updated, but really it's the physical, all the parts of the system. Which means that the price tag has gone up considerably," said Mary Ellen Carrol, executive director of the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management.
The response by emergency crews on Thursday included the cell phone warnings, city rangers closing down oceanside parks, and police and fire crews using sirens and PA announcements from their vehicles.
Malaer said he did not miss the old emergency horn, as it had only one meaning for those who heard it.
"An 'S-Horn' is just a dumb horn. What does it mean? It's just gonna mean one thing, which is evacuate. The warnings we get with the emergency alert system gives us far more information," Malaer said.
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The city's looming budget deficit is further complicating a plan to replace the old horns. It's not clear when, or if, the old sirens or something similar will ever sound off again.
