My department follows the same guide lines most of yall are saying , every piece of appratus will sound there airhorns , our main engine operator will hit the evac button on the truck which sounds off our 5 train horns for 5 blasts a minmum of 30 seconds a piece which we can change to any ammount of time we need , County dispatch will also sound the evac tones
Three blasts of the horn, pause, three blasts etc.
We use the same in wildfire as well. Pity many of the 4WD's don't have an air horn! Normal truck horn over the sound of the pump and the sometimes worse sound of the fire? Not much chance of hearing that. Come to think of it, if a wildfire is that loud what the hell are you doing that close to it anyway?
It's my understanding that the internationally accepted signals for USAR is as follows:
3 short blasts= Evacuate
1 long blast= cease operations, all quiet
1 long blast followed by 1 short blast= Resume operations
If it is already accepted for one stream of our response, shoudn't we adopt it for all events?
one would think there was some kind of standard for this type of thing if such a thing is around I have never heard of it and if there is no such standard I ask why ?
The way we've done it for a long time is IC sends a evacuation notice to all personnel via radio followed by a long blast(30-45 sec.)on the air horns by all apparatus.Officers then do a head count and report.