Emergency agencies will have questions to answer this morning after a false alarm was heard along a 50-kilometre stretch of coastal Bay of Plenty last night.
About 9.15pm, sirens sounded from Tauranga to Waihi - and some reports came in of them sounding further afield.
Many members of the public took the sirens to be a tsunami warning.
About an hour later, the police issued a statement saying they had been in contact with National Emergency Management Agency staff, who believed the alarm to be the result of a technical fault.
On its Facebook page, Bay of Plenty Civil Defence said Fire and Emergency had confirmed a fault in its system and was investigating.
However, Fire and Emergency subsequently released a statement saying "some" of the sirens were at its stations, and it was "focused on working alongside" its partner agencies to find out what caused the false alarm to activate.
Bay of Plenty Civil Defence noted there are no fixed tsunami sirens in the area.
