THE TOWNSFOLK OF ROWLEY, MASSACHUSETTS HAVE been grumbling lately about the overly-frequent sounding of the town’s fire horn.

The horn is mounted in the Town Hall cupola and is used by the mostly-volunteer fire department members as a means to alert them for a fire call.  And as is common in most places, it is blown at noon for a daily test.  But several people have been questioning the necessity for the use of it with today’s modern methods of alerting and dispatching emergency volunteers.

Rowley Town Hall

Apparently the growing number of calls has reached a point where the horn is blasting frequently at all hours of the day and night and is becoming more of a nusiance than a necessity.  The FD uses a telephone paging system as the primary device to alert the members about emergencies.

The town’s Fire Chief James Broderick has responded by agreeing that there could be some reduction in the number of times it is sounded, but he insists that it is currently necessary to continue its use.

“We are required to have a secondary means of dispatching the alarm if the primary means becomes disabled,” he wrote to the board of selectmen. If the paging system is down, “the dispatch center would need to have the ability to sound the alarm.”

The chief did agree that there are ways to reduce the frequency of the horn blasts.  Currently it is sounded for every type of call-out including public service calls.  He recommends following the policy of neighboring communties and using it only for structure fires, automatic fire alarms, by direction of a chief officer of the Fire Department, and for mutual aid requests.  That could reduce the usage by as much as 50%.

The Selectmen agree with him.  “We definitely want to keep the fire horn blowing,” wrote selectmen Chairman Dave Petersen. “Homeland Security mandates we have some sort of alternate system.”

The Newburyport Daily News has the STORY.
Rowley Fire Dept. WEBSITE.

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