Have House Siren, Will Travel

WHEN THE MAHOPAC (NEW YORK) VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT built their new, $5.7 million firehouse in 2007, they completed the upgrade by purchasing a bigger and louder house siren. Originally, they planned to install the new siren in the 25,000 sq. ft. building’s cupola, but it is too large. Plan B called for mounting it on the side of the building where the sound would be directed away from the neighborhood homes and toward the Rte. 6 corridor.

mahopac vfd

Mahopac VFD photo

Nothing doing, said the town officials. The approved plans for the new construction had no such appurtenance included. Next came Plan C, mounting the siren on a piece of vacant land owned by New York City. Request denied.

Finally, they set the siren on a 50-ft. pole in a parking lot just north of the firehouse where it has been operating for just over a year. Until recently, that is. The new monster-siren is so loud that it was shaking the nearby homes and causing people to stop whatever they were doing when it went off. ”You could hear it in the basement of my house with my fingers in my ears,“ said one man. ”I and the community are elated that the MVFD is finally making good on what they told us by taking down this loud siren and giving us back our quality of life by restoring quiet in our neighborhood,“ said another neighbor after the siren was taken down yesterday.

Fire dept. officers are mulling what to do next. They are contemplating Plan E which calls for installing a sound device in the cupola that makes electronic siren-sounding noises.

The Journal News brings us up to date on the story HERE.

Mahopac VFD WEBSITE.

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CommonSense

Here's a thought, sell the Larger Siren and purchase a smaller one that will fit in the building's cupola.

LTVanilla

Forgot to mention, it only goes off when our fire tones are activated, not our ems or general advisement tones.

LTVanilla

Sirens are one of thsoe peices of tradition, that in my district have alerted members who either didn't have their pagers on them or couldn't hear them over their power equipment but did hear the siren (I'm talking within the village where the siren is located). I live several miles out from my station and I can hear the siren just as I'm stepping out to my truck.

Couple that peice of tradition with its legitamite alerting capabilities, no one complains, and I think it has its place.

Bill

Please attach sound bite.

Bill

Lets hear what the siren sounded like.

warrenclement

Why not scrap,sell, trade the siren.
Why even have one?
Pagers are very reliable, it's just that we have always had sirens.
They don't help the members get to the station any quicker, other motorists just disregard them. It's time this old tradition is forgotten.

firehat

My VFD had two sirens (one on the watertower behind the station and one at the City park halfway across town) but both are gone now. We had to revisit our policy after 9/11 when we started getting a lot of complaints about people freaking out that a bomb was about to go off or something. We then only blew the sirens on box alarms and then not at all. I miss the feeling of going to my car in the middle of the night and hearing the wail laying out across the city.

Dal90

While I have no problem maintaining station sirens as a backup alerting device, and testing them regularly, a backup is by definition not used on every call (even if you limit it to "every" fire and MVA).

While I am quite nostalgiac for the sound of the fire siren, and can fondly remember many times leaving my house in the middle of the night to the sounds of the sirens (we had two -- one at the station, one at the school), I do not relate to just how vigorous some places get about defending them.

We first visited our siren policy in 1990 when we began an ambulance service, and having not told the dispatch center otherwise they set the siren off for ambulance-only calls. That ended in the first week of the service. Within a year a couple towns away one of the departments and their neighbors got into a pissing match in the newspaper over the siren, and we chose at that time to revisit our own policy and ceased using it normally from 10pm to 6am, as well as restricting it to fires and MVAs when it was used. That policy remains, although we've removed the school siren.

In my opinion, it would not impact our normal responses on iota if the siren was turned off tomorrow.

Not that I would remove it -- on two occasions last for a few days at a time over the past nearly 20 years we've had problems with the dispatch center being able to tone us out effectively (the nearest transmitter was down, and backup locations don't fully saturate our town). During those periods we fell back to putting the siren in 24 hour usage for all calls, as well as using a phone tree to alert members -- a modern phone tree though since it was done from cell phones.

If it was truly a backup alerting method, there is no need to disturb the neighbors when a call is paged out and members respond. If no one responds, then you can assume there's a communications failure and trip the siren on the re-tone.