'Confused and conflicting.”

One Papamoa mum's experience, and it appears a shared one, of the early hours of Monday morning when the 7.5 earthquake wrecked parts of the South Island and rattled the Bay of Plenty.

MP Todd Muller agrees. 'The text alert warning system let the community down. When it really mattered it didn't seem to work to the level people would expect.”

And the MP has joined the clamour for siren notification. 'This needs to be prioritised.” And he intends to ask questions of the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency.

'Clearly there is a need for the community to have sirens – and there needs to be sirens as soon as possible. It's time to prioritise this and ensure the investment to make it happen.”

The Papamoa mum and her family slept through the text notifications and only became aware of the tsunami threat when a friend rang in the middle of the night to warn them. 'I thought, ‘Is this for real?' I went onto Stuff.co.nz and saw there'd been a huge earthquake – and I thought, ‘Yeah, I am going'.”

So she loaded her six-year-old in the car and headed off to the safety of her mum's house in Tauranga. But not her husband.

'He decided he would wait for the siren which is what we thought would happen in Papamoa. So the messages we are getting are messy and conflicting.”

There were a few Facebook posts saying they received the text notifications, but a lot more called for sirens.

'[Sirens are] definitely needed in Bayfair/Papamoa as a large number of people, including us, slept through our texts.”

The Tauranga City Council says its tsunami investment and planning has been in two stages. Since 2013 it's been working on public education, evacuation routes and safe areas people can escape to from a tsunami.

And now that's nearly in place, the council can look towards the next phase of public safety which is how to alert the community.

Todd Muller believes that's something that should be delivered with urgency. 'I totally endorse locals concerns there isn't a siren and the fact there needs to be one as soon as possible.”

There's also political pressure being applied to the council. A notice of motion has been filed with the chief executive demanding it consider tsunami alerting mechanisms for the city. The notice also calls on staff to present an issues and options paper at the next council meeting early next month.

Gary Benner, who featured in The Weekend Sun last week with his Tsunado alert radios, says his devices are sirens. 'But unlike those mounted on poles which are hard to hear, the Tsunado provides the same loud sound in-house.

'They will waken householders and provide a radio and text screen to inform people of the nature of the disaster and what to do. Pole sirens can't do that.”