In the early hours of August 26th, around 1 am, the sound of air-raid sirens suddenly rang out in Haikou City, Hainan Province, causing some people to panic and hide in underground shelters.
According to a video posted by a netizen, in the Bin Ya Village area of Longhua District in Haikou City, a loud alarm sound started around 1 am and lasted for more than ten minutes. The video captured the piercing sound of the alarm echoing through the night sky, similar to an air-raid warning.
Local residents commented in the online forums, with one noting that the alarm in the Qiuhai Avenue area was particularly loud. A netizen living in the Nanbin Huating community mentioned that upon hearing the air-raid alarm, they didn’t know what was happening and hurried to take shelter in the basement for a while.
Some netizens expressed concerns, wondering if “Hainan Island will become a battleground in the future?”
According to reports from Jímù News, a staff member of the Haikou City 12345 hotline responded by saying that many residents called in the early morning to report the air-raid sirens. After verification, it was confirmed that the alarm sound was mainly concentrated in the Qiuhai Avenue area of Longhua District and originated from the Hairui School located on Qiuhai Avenue. The reason for the alarm activation was not clear at the time. Attempts to reach Hairui School by the media were unsuccessful as no one answered the phone.
On the evening of the 26th, the Haikou City Air Defense Office issued a statement explaining that the alarm sound was triggered by an emergency signal played by the broadcast system at the Hairui School in Haikou City due to a sudden system malfunction and was not caused by any fault or erroneous operation of the air-raid warning system. The current operational status of the Haikou City air-raid warning system was reported to be normal.
However, this incident is not an isolated case. On March 14th of this year, a netizen posted a video claiming that at “1:18 in the morning, there were three consecutive air-raid warning sirens. Did you hear that? I quickly put on clothes and looked outside, only to find everything calm. I went back to sleep, but couldn’t fall asleep again. Why the alarm in the middle of the night?”
In the comments section, netizens from various regions such as Guangxi, Qinghai, Jiangsu, Hunan, Zhejiang Yiwu, Liaoning, Jiangxi, Henan, and others all mentioned similar experiences, saying, “We heard it here too,” “We also heard it, it lasted until after three o’clock,” “We just had it here, what does it mean?” Some even stated, “Yiwu area keeps hearing this kind of sound,” “The same here, there have been these sounds frequently recently.”
One netizen speculated that it was a “water release.” However, the exact meaning behind these sounds is still unconfirmed.