Papamoa residents who woke to the sound of sirens early this morning can rest assured they were not tsunami evacuation warnings.

The low-lying coastal community does not have any public alert system of that nature.

Rather, the sirens were in fact fire engines responding to a false alarm at Papamoa Primary School.

Principal Phil Friar says a fault in the system caused their alarm to go off some time after 6am.

'Ours isn't a siren, though, it's just a horn that says evacuate the building,” says Phil.

'The fire system is on a completely different system to our school bells. So when we either have a correct activation or a malfunction, it phones the fire brigade straight away. So those would have been the sirens people heard.

Those closer to the school correctly picked up the message calling for an evacuation due to fire, with one person posting to Facebook: 'Just across from us in Parton, sounds like the primary school area...."please evacuate something, something fire.”

'Being early in the morning, sounds travel amazingly well, especially in a flat area,” says Phil.

He says, thankfully, nobody rushed over with a bucket.