NEWBERRY, S.C. — The Newberry County Sheriff believes that the storm behind this week's aurora borealis was the cause of a mishap that triggered an alarm system.
It's a warning sound and is normally used only in an emergency. However, according to the Newberry Sheriff, Lee Foster, the blare of their early warning alarm was sent out when it shouldn't have been this weekend.
"It was a beautiful sky - lovely temperature," he said. "I was in my yard, and I heard it, and I said, 'Goodness, what is going on?' So, I immediately called out dispatch, and they said that the 911 center had just been bombarded with calls because they heard the siren as well."
The sheriff said those warnings can only be triggered by a manual switch or in the event of extreme weather conditions - two things that weren't present on Saturday. He said that even if they had been triggered, there would have been a warning from each of the county's 11 early warning alarm systems, which didn't happen.
"Nobody had set it off inside the dispatch center, and the backup dispatch center, nobody is there, and there was no indication of a malfunction there," Foster said. "The only other way that could've been set off would be at the site, and that site was secure as well."
After some investigation, he said the county believes interference from this week's geomagnetic storm likely caused the alarm.
"I'm no Dr. Sheldon Cooper or anything like that, so I'm not sure I understand the premise, but our technicians say it's probably due to the geomagnetic storm that has taken place on the sun," he said.
Astrophotographer and engineer Hap Griffin, who has been tracking the lights and other cosmic activity, said a cosmic event like the one this weekend can impact broadcasts and radiowaves.
"It strips the electrons from the atom, and they become reflective of radio waves," he said. "And so, when we rely on communication with satellites, which a lot of internet is nowadays, and anything that has to do with satellite communication, that reflective layer in our upper atmosphere basically causes issues with communication with those satellites."
Foster said his office would continue to investigate the alarm's cause until they were sure that the same storm had caused the northern lights.
"We don't know at this time whether it was just the fact that it got a pulse from the magnetic fields, or whether it caused - because of the disturbance in the atmosphere - whether it caused some other location that has harmonic tones, to set that off," the sheriff said. "We're going to have to review a lot of things before we find out for sure what caused it, But the technicians believe that's the only explanation."