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?

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At the department I was with we had a fire siren and pagers/radios./ Alot of the "new" residents of the area complained but thank god for the locals standing up for us telling them that to keep your eyes open and that we were responding to a fire or car wreck. It just basically let everyone know that we had a call and to watch out for us
In Del most of the fire companies still use sirens, along with minitior pagers, alpha pagers and we just started receiving text messages over our cell phones. The siren goes off every day at noon and for all calls. Its nice hearing it go off because it lets people know we are responding to call.
We have the newest pagers but we also have a siren but it is only set for 1 long blast then it is off, over the last few years aside from cost to maintain.it apparently people who buy homes "near by" raised a stir about the noise now putting their petty garbage aside in a town meeting the local towns people became more aware we are there from the press the "few" made a stink about. Personally I think its worth having a siren in case you are cutting the lawn or something and either don't have the pager or can't hear it you can always hear the siren
In one of our areas, the Brigade were lucky enough to have a new Station built for them. Next door to a church. The church mad a fuss and the siren was removed...
On the volly side I liked sirens for a couple of reasons. When I was an USAF FF I also ran with a volly company. Not being overly familiar with the area I couldn't recognize addresses within our first due. That's how they dispatched there. Address first, tones, siren. Without the siren, I'd have missed a couple of calls while I was at the station had it not been for the siren.
The other reason I like this, my current job pages me with work. TOOOOO many times after church, movies, etc I have forgotten to turn the volume back up. If i had a siren on my roof that would activate, I'd get back to my customers faster.
I have doubts about counting the blasts of the siren and then looking up a list while driving a car. Still, as long as it works for you, all is good. And cheaper than maintaing a pager system maybe?
They still have pagers .. This system has been like this for years.. I guess you have to hear it to understand it... Too bad cool system.. This dept has lots of money not talking welfare firedept... So cheap is out of the ques.. Now talk about my town fire dept yea we are poor... Thats ok Tony you can't hear it and it's hard to imagine that it works so. So call it a draw...
They dont blow them here anymore but they should we use them for tornado warnings only right now the last time we needed them they had forgotten how to set them off.
the department i used to be on issues pagers only the only sirens in my area are for tornado warnings and they go off a lot for tornado warnings in the souther part of my county here in arkansas im n pulaski county to be exact outside the city of north little rock arkansas. the closest siren to me would probably be either mundo road or blue hill road but im not for sure exactly where the closest one to me is located.
My fire department has an air horn on the main house the sub station use to have a siren on it but the resident complained too much so we got rid of it we alos use to have one on the west end of town, but the same applied. the air horn is loud some times you can hear it from 5 miles away depending on the wind direction.
i have never heard of a towns fire siren we have pagers and handheld radios.
Fort Laramie still has siren's as well as pager tones. Most of the Departments in and around Wyoming still use Fire Sirens and warning alert systems.

We usually dont sound them late at night but during the day on calls its always sounded.

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