We've got a siren in my bit of Bristol
it's tested once a month (3pm on the first Thursday of the month I think)
I don't know about your siren, but ours is to warn of a fire/explosion at one of the chemical plants or fuel depots in Avonmouth. Pretty much "if it goes off and you're not expecting it, go inside and shut the windows, summat nasty is coming towards you on the wind"
Every couple of years they send out a leaflet with a map in it showing all the risk sites with fallout zones drawn round them showing you how at risk of death you are.
Thankfully, while I'm in earshot of the siren I'm not in any of the danger zones.
I know where one of the siren towers is, and for years I've been meaning to go and hang around at the base of it during a test to see how loud it is :)
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LP, Sun 26 Aug 2012, 15:05,
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We can hear the same sirens
There are several of them, for different factories in Avonmouth. I've got that leaflet hiding on a shelf somewhere and it tells you the days and times for each different siren. Problem is that there is one on Monday at 10am, one on Wednesday at 11am, one on Thursday at 2pm, one on Sunday at 10am, one on the third Wednesday of the month at 3pm, one on the 2nd Tuesday of the month at midday, one on the third Wednesday after Ascension Sunday at 10am, except in leap years when it's at 11am, one on the 4th Tuesday in February on years where there is a 3 in it and so on. So no-one actually knows when the tests are running and just ignores them all anyway.
And yeah, they all sound like air-raid sirens.
In the mid-80s, when I was a teenager, the air-raid siren in my part of Bath went off at about 2am one night. Scared the crap out of me! A couple of local old boys had heart attacks and died and everyone was talking about it at school the next day. You could hear it on the other side of the city, my house was 100 yards from the siren itself. The official excuse from the council, (or police, or whoever was responsible for it) was that they tested the air raid sirens regularly but with the loop to the sirens themselves switched off so they didn't actually go off. The test that night had been a normal test but they had forgotten to switch the siren loop off so it actually went off, for which they were sorry. Which completely failed to explain why they were testing air raid sirens at 2am and how they expected to actually test them without making a sound! They have since been removed.
(, Mon 27 Aug 2012, 15:59, Share, Reply)