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Mystery Sirens

GNC

GNC

King-Sized Canary
Joined
Aug 25, 2001
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In conversation with a friend last night, he reminded me of a strange phenomenon from our childhoods. Where we live there are no Air Force or Army bases, or factories, but every once in a while you would hear a siren go off in the distance for a minute or two. No rhyme or reason for it, as far as we could see, but there it was.

This would be back in the seventies, so can anyone think of any reason why what sounded like an air raid siren would be going off in suburbia? Or what we might have mistaken for it? No, it wasn't the Four Minute Warning, we're still around.
 
Heard them in Middlesbrough and its surrounds quite a lot over the years - though having Wilton (big chemical works etc.) on your doorstep probably doesn't help. Any chemical companies within a few miles of where you grew up?
Drills perhaps? Testing of equipment even.
 
gncxx said:
...every once in a while you would hear a siren go off in the distance for a minute or two. No rhyme or reason for it, as far as we could see, but there it was...
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As part of the early warning system during the Cold War there were sirens all over the place and they were tested on a pretty regular basis, once a month I think. (IIRC they were decommisioned in the early 90's as part of wider ranging defence cuts). I can remember hearing them when I was at school. We also had the quarry sirens going off fairly regularly so I doubt anyone would have taken a blind bit of notice if things had got real.
 
A quarry is a possibility, chemical plants not so much, it was pretty residential and close to the countryside where I grew up.

The chance of it being an actual air raid siren is oddly disturbing! We would have been so used to it we wouldn't have reacted.
 
gncxx said:
The chance of it being an actual air raid siren is oddly disturbing! We would have been so used to it we wouldn't have reacted.
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I've had the same conversation you and your friend had on a couple of occasions and what's struck me is that when you mention it people go from "no don't remember that at all" to "oh yeah, now you mention it..." very quickly, which suggests to me that it became sublimated - just another aspect of our aural wallpaper at the time - and as such would very probably have been utterly useless as any form of actual warning.
 
Here in Michigan, our alert sirens are tested monthly. They go on and off for about 1/2 hour and can be heard for miles. I had the misfortune of being right next to one during a test cycle. Ruined a perfectly grand game of bocci ball. Anyway, the only time I've ever heard them reacting to an emergency was during a torando warning. Not sure where you live but if you get severe weather, maybe your community would test them once in a while like mine does.
 
Not much severe weather where I live, but my dad suggested they could have been from the local fire station as well. He recalls as a boy the fire station in his town would test their siren (which sounded like an air raid siren) every lunchtime.
 
gncxx said:
He recalls as a boy the fire station in his town would test their siren (which sounded like an air raid siren) every lunchtime.
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Here, the docks use a horn or siren to mark the lunch break!
 
Hm... there seems to be a lot of it about!
 
Yes, in Panora, Iowa, when I was little in the 60s, the local fire station would sound it's alarm every day at noon - the noon whistle! The whole town marked time by it. At noon it was routine, but if it went off at any other time you'd turn on the radio and listen for the EBS warnings while the volunteer fire department people in your family ran to their stations. It'd probably be a tornado warning. If it were a fire, the on-duty firemen would have deployed and you'd hear the truck.

Lots of outdoor industries used to mark the hours, breaks, and shift changes with whistles, horns, or sirens that could be heard in every part of the quarry or whatever. (As seen on the Flintstones.)
 
Yeah, there are so many explanations it's mildly frustrating that I can't pin it down to any single one of them. Too late to find out now anyway, I should have asked at the time. Heigh ho.
 
When I was a kid in the mid 90s, I remember hearing 'air raid' sirens during my walk to school sometimes. I had to pass close to an industrial area, so it sounded like they were coming from there. I was told that they were using them as fire alarms and just testing them every morning, or that they sounded them to let the workers know their shift was starting. I find the 'fire alarm' theory more believable, as while the sirens were sounded at a certain time, I think it was only once every week or so.

For the record, this was in the UK, in an industrial midland town.
 
There are sirens, situated on public buildings, schools, police stations, telephone exchanges, etc. all over Britain and they are probably tested regularly. It's all part of the Civil defence set up.

Here in the Netherlands, there's a policy on their use, in case of natural, or man-made, disaster, floods, chemical factory explosions, etc. The sirens are tested here, where I live, at 12 0'clock, on the first Monday of every month.
 
I previously posted over here about the Broadmoor siren. I don't know if other institutions use a similar system, or whether it's just Broadmoor that has it.
 
Our fire alarm gets tested every monday at 8.30 - it always scares the life out of me every time!

In 1989 - when I was a school, an air raid siren really did go off. There were sirens on the school building left over from the war and a short circuit had set it off. Scared the living daylights out of the old dears who lived nearby.
The school also still had black out curtains knocking around - tattered, but still there and the desks were the old fashioned lift up lid kind with ink wells. I went to school in a time warp, I swear!
 
Daftbugger1 said:
In 1989 - when I was a school, an air raid siren really did go off. There were sirens on the school building left over from the war and a short circuit had set it off.
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Ha ha! That reminds me of when, as a student (in the 60s), I had a really crap motorbike.

One night a short caused the horn to sound, and it woke up most of the students on that side of the building...

But I lived on the opposite side, and slept peacefully through the whole thing!
 
Well, I have a little confession to make.

Some years ago, one of my friends appropriated a portable air-raid siren from somewhere. It had legs, stood about 4' high, and worked by way of a great big crank handle. Literally, wind it up and let it wail. I recall it used to take some considerable force to move the crank, but once it was moving one man could wind away. Once you stopped winding the wailing would slow down and stop as it dragged to a halt.

Alas, this was a time when alcohol was my primary concern in life, so I didn't pay that much attention to the workings of the siren, I wish I had now, or asked where he got it from. (I said "friend" above, more like "passing acquaintance")

The one thing I do remember distinctly was that it was BASTARD LOUD. Especially when it was wound up inside a building ;)
I became aware of it when this chap dragged it onstage before a gig in the backroom of a pub, much to the bemusement of the waiting punters. Then he wound it up..........

I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen or heard, it floored everyone in that building, how could any band compete with that?

Of course the next development from there is mounting it in the back of a Land Rover, getting pissed, then having some fool drive you round at 3AM whilst you sit in the back winding away like Windy Miller, then phoning the local papers to complain about the 4 minute warning siren that has had you hiding in the cellar, all to the bewilderment of "the authorities" who deny all knowledge of any such siren.

Ah, happy days!

*Edit* There's loads of these things kicking about, been a few on E-bay recently. I AM going to get one to play with"
 
When I was in elementary school (in the US), there was one which was tested every Wednesday at 12:00. Thinking back on it made me realize that we were eating lunch well before noon, as it would sound 10 minutes before our after lunch recess ended.

Now there are 2 in my neighborhood (in Japan) which sound on Monday and Thursday. My husband insists with 100% confidence that they`re lunch break horns for local factories... But if they are, I feel very sad for the workers who only get to eat once a week.
 
Back during the Midwestern tornadoes of April 4, 1974, the sirens went off in Cincinnati, Ohio. We could hear them quite plainly in Northern Kentucky, where I then lived.

"What's that?" asked my younger brother.

"I'm not entirely certain," I replied, "but I THINK those are the old World War Two air raid sirens."

"I didn't realize those still existed," said Brother.

"Neither did I," said I. "But they're not the sort of things one throws away. Have you ever seen one set out for the trash? Besides, what else SOUNDS like that?"

Today there are sirens mounted on the roof of a building directly across the street from my apartment and they're tested at Noon on the first and third Wednesdays of the month. There's more several blocks south.

If there's ever a tornado at those times we'e all DOOMED.
 
Yes, OTR, Troy McClure said it best...

"You might remember me from such educational films as...Phony Tornado Alarms Reduce Readiness,"

Apparently here in the States, the definition of "Tornado Warning" has been changed. It is now a "warning" when doppler radar picks up a particular signature that indicates that possibly, if conditions are exactly right, the moon is full, and you haven't had a glass of water that day, a tornado might be thinking about considering maybe forming in some area within 6,000 miles of you.

We just recently had a two-week period of terrible (well, for me they're wonderful) storms here in Wisconsin (and Illinois, Iowa, etc.) resulting in a lot of flood damage and a number of tornadoes (real spotted ones, not "radar glitches").

In my area, Milwaukee, our siren went off so constantly when there was nothing threatening apparent on radar (or indeed visible to the naked eye) that I decided it would be more reliable to just take my camera with me and watch the damned skies.

I spotted some severe rotation once (go figure, this triggered NO reaction on the part of the local or national weather service) almost directly over the top of my place, which turned out to be nothing. Still, I finally got a couple of forked-lightning pictures; they're not the best, but I can finally say I caught a lightning bolt.
 
And then there's the problem of what's going to happen if those air raid sirens are ever again required to perform their originally-intended function of warning about a flight of enemy bombers overhead.

We'll just ignore them, business as usual.
 
Another problem is that children learn to associate the sound of sirens as the sound of tornadoes, rather than protection against them, and thus can acquire a life-long fear of sirens.

Similarly, I imagine children in World War Two Britain learned to associate air-raid sirens with the sound of approaching German bombers.

In much the same way I long, long ago associated the smell of kerosene-based "bug" sprays with the odor of insects.
 
myf13 said:
I previously posted over here about the Broadmoor siren. I don't know if other institutions use a similar system, or whether it's just Broadmoor that has it.
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I grew up within earshot of the Broadmoor siren myself, and I can remember that it was always tested at least once a week (was it Monday at 10 am?). It was always quite spooky - especially so if it went off at a time other than the test time...
 
A couple of years ago, after a long "tornado watch" night (conditions were right for tornados to form) I woke up at about 4am to the sound of a siren off in the distance. I turned on the TV but there was no official warning and if there had been, more of the sirens should have gone off, not just one. The next day I found out that lightening had struck the siren, which sat up high on a pole and, therefore, was in a good position to be struck by lightening and go off accidentally. I guess it woke up the neighborhood and wasn't shut down until over an hour later.

When I was a teen in the 80s, the air raid siren over on the high school a few blocks away would sometimes go off at odd times because some pranksters my age were playing around with it. But again, I figured if it'd been a real emergency, more than one siren would be going off.

The air raid pattern (up and down rather than one long blast) was used as an imminent tornado warning in my town back in about 1997. Rotations had been spotted very close by. (I laugh about it looking back because my downstairs neighbors put their cat in the basement and headed out on the porch to watch.)

And finally, as recently as the late-90s I heard an air raid siren over at the air field (not a base, just a field) on more than one occasion. To be honest, it did kind of freak me.
 
I had a similar experience late one afternoon around two years ago. The siren several blocks south of my apartment (I've mentioned it in a previous post) started its demonic wail, but the one directly across the street remained silent. No other sirens went off either.

The next day's television news mentioned it, saying that it was a mechanical glitch.
 
My grandad lived not far from a railway line and I can remember visiting him as a kid on hot summer days and hearing a siren that used to scare the crap out of me. It seemed to happen on the hottest and stillest of days, you could see the railway lin in the distance shimmering, and just hear the rise and fall of the siren.

I seem to recall being told it was a siren to call the signalman to his box, but thinking about it now, could this be correct? Surely they didn't need to have men in boxes by the side of the mainline in 1970s Britain operating signals? I know they used to wail for ages, so the bloody signalman was obviously up to no good, typical British Rail!

The only alternative could be that it was some sort of siren from the Radio Station which the line passed right by. I mean the Rugby Radio Station, the one that transmitted to subs and did the atomic clock signals etc. and which made my grandad's place a perfect place for Ivan the Russky to plonk a nuke if we came to blows.

I've never heard a noise like it since, it wasn't like a typical air-raid siren, and thinking about it now, many years later, it still gives me the creeps. Any rail enthusiasts know what it might have been?
 
I can't remember living anywhere where there weren't sirens for some reason or another, from remote country areas to central London. Disconcertingly, we live fairly close to some disused quarries, which are worked very occasionally when the owner needs just sufficient materials for some small project, typically much less than once a year.
Because of the sporadic nature of the working we think he's picked up an ex-WW2 siren because it is identical to the air raid warning sound in documentaries. Although I'm too young to remember the war it certainly triggers a vicarious folk memory when it does go off and even once you've rationalised it it's hard not to feel agitated.

Like the good Lord in the previous post I also associate sirens with unusually still summer conditions, possibly because I used to date a girl years ago who lived in the sticks near a gypsum quarry and those conditions were ideal for blasting. Conversely a friend of mine is a county mines and minerals officer and a lot of his headaches are caused by surrepticious blasting that isn't proceeded by any warning and the first the local's know about it is rattling windows and shaking floors.

On Lord R's point about railways, if the line was a private industrial branch or a power station or similar they were subject to different kinds of warnings, either for hazardous movement, or to warn of the need to move ground points. A siren sounds rather OTT so I'd say your guess of calling up a worker who was normally employed in a different task elsewhere, like a signalman, is quite likely.
 
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