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Posted by Steven Stone on November 22, 2007, 1:02 pm
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The FD pull boxes in my small city of 40,000 souls were removed. FD
claimed too many false alarms, especially in the low income areas of
the city.
News article on the subject from local paper
Steve
N2UBP
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Middletown retires out-of-date fire alarm system
By Kristina Wells
Times Herald-Record
March 30, 2007
Middletown =3F Mr. G. Kirby pulled the very first fire alarm box in this
city. His tug on box No. 34 at Mill and Harding streets alerted
firefighters to a blaze at the Monhagen Straw Hat Works. That was 120
years ago.
And just like Mr. Kirby, the Gamewell Co. fire alarm boxes soon will be
long gone.
Middletown's alarm pull boxes are going the way of the bucket brigade
and the horse-drawn wagon.
On April 9, the city will begin decommissioning the estimated 150 fire
alarm boxes. Many of them have been off-line for years and are beyond
repair. To fix the antiquated system =3F first activated in February 1888
=3F would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And in this era of E-911, pagers and cell phones, a pull box hard-wired
to the central fire house and horn is an obsolete way to notify
firefighters. The horns will remain active as an alert system in a
citywide emergency, said Jacob Tawil, city public works commissioner.
"It's a tradition," he said of the pull boxes. "It breaks somebody's
heart to pull them down."
Businesses with pull boxes on site were notified of the change in
February and encouraged to update alarm systems to automatically alert
the fire department through phone lines of an emergency. Also, three
Middletown School District buildings are being retrofitted to do just
that, at a cost of about $5,000, said Superintendent Ken Eastwood.
Residents will have to either call 911 or the central fire house
directly.
The technology is old and so is the issue of what to do with the pull
boxes. For years, city officials have debated, weighing progress
against tradition and history.
"It's an outdated technology," said Peter Laskaris, city historian.
"That was the best they had at the time."
A study done in 2003 by then city Fire Inspector Rich Duncanson put the
cost of saving the outdated system at nearly $250,000. Back then,
Duncanson =3F who retired earlier this month =3F called upon city officials
to do away with the pull boxes.
The pull boxes are ripe for abuse as well. A 1991 study by an
engineering firm found the boxes were "constantly breaking" and the
primary source for false alarms. Even back in 1888, when the boxes
first went online, false alarms happened, according to a 1959 local
history book called "Brave Men and Bright Machines." The book tells of
a pull on box No. 23, sounding the alarm for a fire in a pile of
cornstalks.
Turns out, a boy set the fire himself. Seems he wanted to hear the bell
toll.
For more information on the decommissioning of the fire boxes, check
out the city's Web site at www.middletown-ny.com. Some information
provided by "Brave Men and Bright Machines."
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Posted by John L on November 22, 2007, 10:11 pm
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We recently put a call box on the front of our fire station. It's a
volunteer department, and there's frequently nobody there nights and
weekends. The call box is in fact a ringdown phone that dials 911,
attached to a normal phone line.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
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