The Siren Board

freebrickproductions wrote:This is a great thread, Brendan! Very informative.
I should post a thread about what I've learned about Huntsville's old siren system.

Thanks!

On the humor files, Please take a lesson from me, do not grind your hands into nubs like I did when typing this. They don't exactly work when they're nubs you see....

Yes, this thread drew me because of the information it had.
I'd probably get banned for starting a thread about my city's old system info...

Oh boy thread bumping!

I got to thinking about the 1980 siren misfire I talked about in the original post. Now that I think about it, how could a rodent chewing on a wire (the alleged cause) trip a whole siren system into going off, and how were they originally activated?

The old telephone systems relied on a closed contact to start the sirens. You basically had two wires, one of them had power on it all the time. The other one was dead until the switch was closed, completing the circuit. If you shorted those two wires together anywhere you completed the circuit, and woke up the town.

holler wrote:The old telephone systems relied on a closed contact to start the sirens. You basically had two wires, one of them had power on it all the time. The other one was dead until the switch was closed, completing the circuit. If you shorted those two wires together anywhere you completed the circuit, and woke up the town.

So, in short, the sirens were phone line activated, and the alleged incident of the rodent chewing on the wires led to the circuit to complete thus setting off all 28 sirens? I feel like I am missing something but cannot figure out what it is...

Yep, it's happened before.

holler wrote:The old telephone systems relied on a closed contact to start the sirens. You basically had two wires, one of them had power on it all the time. The other one was dead until the switch was closed, completing the circuit. If you shorted those two wires together anywhere you completed the circuit, and woke up the town.

That happened years ago in Smyrna, GA. All the town's sirens sounded about 5 A.M. one morning. I turned on the TV but heard no warnings or such. The sirens were sounding "attack," which was unusual because the city used "alert" for tests and tornado warnings.

Later that day I learned from friend who worked at the E.M.A. that heavy rains had shorted out some telephone lines controlling the sirens, so that's what made them sound.

Melvin Potts wrote:

holler wrote:The old telephone systems relied on a closed contact to start the sirens. You basically had two wires, one of them had power on it all the time. The other one was dead until the switch was closed, completing the circuit. If you shorted those two wires together anywhere you completed the circuit, and woke up the town.

That happened years ago in Smyrna, GA. All the town's sirens sounded about 5 A.M. one morning. I turned on the TV but heard no warnings or such. The sirens were sounding "attack," which was unusual because the city used "alert" for tests and tornado warnings.

Later that day I learned from friend who worked at the E.M.A. that heavy rains had shorted out some telephone lines controlling the sirens, so that's what made them sound.

Hmm... That seems like a common problem in older siren systems. Smyrna in 19xx, DeKalb in 1980, and maybe some other places too.

When I was a kid living in Garland, TX late one night the sirens went off (yes the hurricanes) for it seemed like forever before they shut them off. Probably a similar situation happened, this was in the early 90's.

Oh great another bump

I got to thinking about another thing, mainly that 1981 dated siren pole in Downtown Stone Mtn. I wonder, what compelled the county to move that siren there? I also discovered another potential siren move. near the pole at Dunham Park Road and Kensington Road, about a few hundred feet from the pole with the blower pipe on it, there is a bare pole that is just "there" (you can easily see it from 285...). I wonder if that was a thunderbolt pole but then the siren got moved. The pole I am describing is a bare pole that's warped to all hell and back, that from what I can tell, looks like about the same height as a standard Thunderbolt pole.

Also, for the AT&T long line tower geeks, there is one behind the siren pole at Lewis Road and Litton Drive in Stone Mountain. I spotted it out of the blue when my dad and I were going down US-78, and I managed to nab a few photos of it.