So I've moved in to a small town in NY about half a mile away from a volunteer fire department. It turns out that one method they use to alert volunteers is a fire siren (sounds like an air raid siren) at all hours of the day and night. I'm somewhat familiar with this because I grew up one town over and they used to use a fire siren when I was a kid but have since stopped over the last couple of decades. However, my new VFD still uses the siren and according to the chief who I contacted about this it's automatically hooked up to go through about 10 cycles every time there's all call, even in the middle of the night, even if it's not life threatening.

I want to say I'm grateful for all firefighters, especially volunteers. I work with them, have them as my friends, and even have a family member who has volunteered for decades. I want them to be notified quickly and I don't want to sound cranky or whiney. But I did ask the chief if it was possible to retire the siren to alert volunteers as they have a text message system and pagers which I'm confident can wake up volunteers overnight without waking up the entire community. The chief brought it up to their monthly meeting and told me that they felt they needed to keep the siren because there are still members who rely on it and "paging/text messaging is not 100%."

As I tried to learn more about how other communities go about their volunteer notifications in my area I've found the siren is actually a contentious issue for many but it is very rarely discussed or reported on. There is only one article I've found discussing the issue where a VFD brought their siren back after 7 years despite no issues during the time it was broken. Locally some have brought it back due to nostalgia. If you check the thread I made on this topic locally there are volunteers who openly admit they love the siren even though they know they don't need it. On my thread there is even a nostalgia factor for residents who actually feel comforted by the siren and feel that asking for it to be retired is in some way attacking volunteers or appreciation for them. There are many other threads across Reddit on this topic as well where similar arguments about keeping or getting rid of it. It seems I've stepped into something far greater than I thought.

There is one thing that bothers me still about my particular situation. Our area is seeing an increase of tornadoes with climate change with 3 cell phone warnings to immediately get in the basement within the last 6 months, each time tornadoes did touch ground. It seems to me that paging and text messaging DOES allow for the redundancy that's needed for an alert system for volunteers. However none of those tornado warnings that I got over my phone were alerted through the fire siren from the department (as it's only used for volunteers and not to warn the community). There is no redundancy for the community for the increased tornado warnings and the alert system over phones isn't perfect (my wife didn't get the alert on her phone but I did). I feel like the original reason these fire sirens were installed were to warn the community of dangers to everyone, not just a few volunteers, and tornadoes are the perfect use of such a system. Yet it seems like nostalgia is a bigger priority for many more than the community function that I see it being essential for.

I'm not trying to start arguments, I'm just trying to learn. I know that in NY and PA whether the siren is used is a local decision and as I said only one town over no siren is used at all anymore. I know it's usually a decision made by the department in the bylaws and not a community decision. I can accept I'm only one voice and respect the department. But I'm curious how things work in respect to the other 48 states for both volunteers and tornadoes? Any and all discussion is welcome, even if you passionately disagree with me, just please be respectful!