False depot alarm set off Wednesday

This story was published Thu, Apr 18, 2002

By Karen Zacharias
Herald Oregon bureau

PLYMOUTH -- Mike Tobin was sitting in his office at Watts Brothers Farms at 3 p.m. Wednesday when emergency alarms pierced the skies indicating an accident at the Umatilla Chemical Depot.

He never heard a sound.

"Are we gonna die?" he asked.

No, Mr. Tobin, you're fine. The activation was accidental. There was no emergency at the site seven miles west of Hermiston where 3,717 tons of deadly chemical nerve agent are stored.

"Guess I don't have to kiss my butt goodbye then," Tobin said with a laugh.

Tobin wasn't sure if his tone-alert radio was turned on.

"I thought it was. That's what I'm going to go check right now," he said.

But the tone-alert radios were not activated. It was the 20 outdoor sirens that run along the Washington border from McNary Dam, south to Crow Butte, said Korenza Trujillo, spokeswoman for Benton County Emergency Services.

This is the first time the Benton County alarms have been accidentally activated, Trujillo said. Umatilla and Morrow counties' sirens, which were inadvertently activated in December 1999, created mass confusion for area residents.

Safeguards reportedly were then designed into the emergency system to prevent such accidents. There is a multi-step process used to activate the alarms.

Trujillo did not know exactly what went wrong, but she said the incident occurred during routine training of new emergency dispatchers.

No emergency crews were dispatched. And Trujillo said to her knowledge no residents panicked.

Dan Dufault runs a farm between Plymouth and Paterson. Dufault said he was in his farm office most of the day and never heard the sirens. He wasn't sure whether the guys working the fields outside heard the sirens.

"I didn't know the alarms went off until a friend from Prosser called and told me," Dufault said. "But in a real emergency, the radio would've been activated, and I would've heard it."

 

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