The next step towards Tauranga getting a tsunami warning system would be decided by the council later this month. It will include a full report on the June 1 test and an assessment of the other shortlisted siren, an example of which already warned residents living in the small beach settlement of Omaha, north of Auckland.
Papamoa's test involved mounting the sirens on cherry pickers at the corner of Palm Beach Boulevard and Sovereign Drive and the corner of Papamoa Beach Rd and Alexander Place.
Mr Somers said the test showed that the system would not reach the noise levels the council needed to achieve of a minimum 75 decibels to 80 per cent of the population. Doubts about the efficiency of electronic hooter sirens has prompted Tauranga City Council member Bill Grainger to reiterate his support for sirens of World War II.
A modern version of the air-raid siren has been promoted by Wellington engineering company Tactical Tooling as offering the answer to Tauranga's tsunami warning problems.
Company design engineer Gary Lewis said the firm originally designed electronic hooter systems but quickly discovered that, due to laws of physics, they were doomed to failure as they could never be entirely successful at long distances. He had looked at a traditional wartime siren and discovered it had an ability to generate a shock wave that had the same shape as thunder or the boom from a supersonic aircraft.
The company claimed it could achieve coverage of Tauranga using six sirens at $10,000 each, at an estimated total installed cost of $100,000.
Mr Grainger shared Mr Lewis' enthusiasm for war-siren technologies. "When a tsunami is coming in, what do people want? They want to hear something, no matter how loud it is," he said.