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Town sirens and or pagers
I was recently driving through a town in Virginia when the towns fire siren went off and I thought, wow, thats a sound from the past.
Or is it?
How many of you Vollies still have sirens calling you to the station?
We don't have sirens in our area, alpha numeric pagers only, I for one would love to have the re introduction of a siren during daylight hours as I believe it would alert the rest of the area that their fire fighters will be driving to the station and are in action.
Now we are usually unseen, unknown and unapreciated. A lot of the inhabitants do not even know our department are volunteers.
What do you think, should the sirens still be used?
Or is it?
How many of you Vollies still have sirens calling you to the station?
We don't have sirens in our area, alpha numeric pagers only, I for one would love to have the re introduction of a siren during daylight hours as I believe it would alert the rest of the area that their fire fighters will be driving to the station and are in action.
Now we are usually unseen, unknown and unapreciated. A lot of the inhabitants do not even know our department are volunteers.
What do you think, should the sirens still be used?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by steve price on
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here in western ny we still use the sirens in both erie and niagara counties but in my city we used to have an air horn to announce the box alarms and at 9pm unitll the horn broke and the county took over the water dept and the police hijacked dispatch
i miss those days
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Permalink Reply by Dan Thomas on
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I work in a county where we have 10 stations and only 1 still uses the old "house siren" EVERY time their fire alert tone goes off...no matter what time of day. The firehouse sits in a very populous neighborhood and also lies within eye shot of a church. I, myself, do not attend that church but could you imagine on a Sunday service and all is quiet and then you hear the roar of that siren going off?? They insist that they keep the siren only because of "tradition" but come on I think tradition can only go far when a neighbor gets woke up at 3AM for the fire department to go and investigate a CO detector going off
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Permalink Reply by MILLGROVE40 on
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Im a volunteer firefighter with Millgrove VFD, serving Alden/ Lancaster,NY area... our fire department still has a siren at our hall that is active whenever we are paged with a fire call or ems call. whether it be 2 o clock in the evening or 2 oclock in the morning, that siren is going off. The firefighters of my fire hall also carry the alpha numeric pagers as well as the minitor 5 pagers... living right down the road from my fire department my neighbors are probably annoyed by now because all you hear coming from my house is my house scanner going off at the same time as my minitor 5 pager...then after those go off, the siren from the fire dept sounds, then my alpha numeric pager sounds in the middle of the siren going off XD i love it...i think all fire departments should have the siren, its good to let everyone know, personally.
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Permalink Reply by Tony P on
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Great story Stijn! Shows that there has to be a back-up system for our alerts! Technology isn't infallible The fact that you didn't really have such a back-up system, but that people rapidly took action says a lot, very good work on their part.
We have a Statewide paging system, alpha-numeric. If the system goes down, there's supposed to be another off-site that kicks in immediately. Should kick-in? The problem is, will anyone know if both systems fail? I hope so. We have a manual back up that can be used - a conference call will be placed to the volunteer officers in the area needed, in my Brigade these officers will then send a telephone text message to their own 'duty crew' and we then all respond to the Station. This paging system is only a couple of years old, and when it was introduced the manual back-up was devised. My officers said they'd just head to the Station and set off the siren to alert the rest of us - I told them that's no good because even at only 600 metres away there are times when I can't hear it - wind direction, heavy traffic etc. (I know I can't hear it at times because we set it off every Sunday as a test)
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so does the mayor or council come to the door and tell you that there is a fire too in your city? How many different "alerting" systems do you need?
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Permalink Reply by Zack Spalding on
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Hopefully that gets them a great ISO rating. :)
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Yeah I'd hope so. Hell with all that they should be a Class 1 Dept.
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we still use our minitor pagers as our primary notification for all of our calls, and we also use alpha-neumeric pagers as well since we are part of the state wide wireless alert network, our biggest problem is with dispatch, it all depends on who is on duty and if the click the right button and if they are handling the counter, and police radio at the same time.
sometimes we get our calls on the alphas on time, ten minutes late or not at all
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We have different dispatchers for Police, Fire and Ambulance.
For us (Fire) selection of Stations to dispatch is automatic from the address keyed in. But you've raised a question for me - do our operators have to 'click' on screen to initiate the paging or does it happen as soon as the address is in? I must ask.
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Permalink Reply by Fire Capt. 1304 on
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We use pagers and the siren. However the siren is only set off between 6am and 9pm. It is set off first page for fires and second page for medicals.
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Permalink Reply by Shane on
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The volunteer department I belong to still uses a siren for all calls day or night. We also have use the minitor V pagers. The siren is more for a back up and to alert the public that there is an emergency that the fire department will be responding to. There have been a few times in the past when the paging system didn't work and the siren alerted us to the call.
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Permalink Reply by Kyle on
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Here in VA our county uses pagers, but some departments still use sirens as well. Our department has one that dispatch controls separately from our pagers so that it does not go off for every call. Our siren is supposed to blow every first page, no matter what type of call or time of day, but some dispatchers fail to set it off.
And if new people move to town, they will just have to get over it, we don't plan on turning it off any time soon. - Attachments:
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AirRaidSiren.wav, 46 KB
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