Do the sirens go off at noon on Saturday in your town?

[Floogeldy]

They do in mine, to test them and keep them in working order for when the tornadoes come!

[Heidi]

1. Nope, but

the church bells clang every half hour.

[Floogeldy]

13. Does it bother you?

?

[Heidi]

14. Not anymore.

It's background noise, just like the trains and the speedboats on the lake. :shrug:

Actually, when I do notice the church bells, they're sort of comforting.

[Floogeldy]

15. I found them soothing . . .

. . . when I was going to college.

:)

[justabob]

2. Wednesday, once a month here

if I am remembering right. I gotta say those things are LOUD if you happen to live across the street from one of the sirens.

What do you call them... just sirens? For some reason I have always called them 'air raid sirens'. I don't know how I picked that up, but I did.

[NaturalHigh]

7. Wednesday here, too.

[xmas74]

3. Once a month here.

But I lived in a town once where they were sounded at 6 am, noon and 11 pm.

[Blue Diadem]

4. Our town and the local towns who have VFD's test them daily

at noontime. They do the civil defense siren test the first Sat. of each month at 10:00am.

[gollygee]

5. 1 pm first Saturday of the month

same reason :D

[lizziegrace]

6. Every Wednesday at noon n/t

[RetroLounge]

8. They used to where I grew up.

Can't recall hearing them here...

RL

[Dolomite]

9. It's a sign that the terrorists are coming!

.

[CatholicEdHead]

10. Sirens going off, espically in the evening have a sad past in the US

Due to the history of racism.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/051001/1sundown.htm

"You'd never heard of a sundown town?

When I was growing up I never heard of them. I was aware that some towns had few if any black folks, but they were often boring towns that I didn't want to live in, and I didn't see why black people would want to live there. I figured it was by choice, but it wasn't.

So you didn't think there were so many of them around?

When I started, I thought I'd have 10 in Illinois because I was focusing my research there and 50 in the whole country, but I found 472 in Illinois and 10,000 across the country.

Whoa.

I would get depressed. It wasn't happy research. I heard that some towns sounded a siren at 6 p.m. each night, and the origin was to tell blacks to get out of town. When I first heard that story, I thought it was an urban legend. But I found enough proof that now I'm suspicious of any town that has a 6 p.m. whistle. Some of them just tell people it's 6 p.m., but originally had a racial connotation.

How much of this research surprises people?

People I talk with often think I'm doing my research in the South. But very few people in the South ever did this. In Mississippi, I only found six sundown towns. Compare that to Illinois. The South was certainly racist but in a different way. Why would you make your maid leave? Southern whites moving to sundown towns in Indiana or other places were astonished that they couldn't bring along servants."

[auntAgonist]

11. 1st Saturday of the month.

they used to test EVERY saturday at noon in the town I lived in, in Ontario.

[Midlodemocrat]

12. Where I grew up they did.

Not here.

[scarlet_owl]

16. No. Here they go off first Tuesday of the month.

[Call Me Wesley]

17. Wednesday, once a year here.

And the former mayor had a siren mounted on his little truck and drove up/down the hill like nuts. Why the hell does Switzerland need sirens? Oh well, yes, there's this big dam here. It might break once ...

[EstimatedProphet]

18. Yes they do

In both rural Ohio and rural Georgia, the last place I lived.

[pookieblue]

24. you just can't escape them eh?

:hi:

[EstimatedProphet]

25. Aaaaah!! The sirens! The sirens!

[samplegirl]

19. no

have never heard them drill and fire & rescue is
right in my backyard practically.
Maybe I'm deaf.

[Shine]

20. Nope, not here.

out here on the west coast, we deal mostly with earthquakes, not tornadoes

too bad there's no siren system for THEM. oh well.

:hi:

[Nikia]

21. Yes

I am pretty sure that it is every Saturday and only Saturday although I guess that I wouldn't know if they went off in the middle of the week.
The little village that I spent my last couple of years in high school at tested their sirens daily.

[Book Lover]

22. Every day at noon

in one of the places where I grew up.

[catmandu57]

23. Monday through Friday

They're never right at noon usually a few minutes past, it's background noise now, I'm suprised when I hear it.

[SoCalDem]

26. We had one about 5 FEET from my kids' bedroom

and they always managed to test it at naptime..:(..Never any real schedule..just did it on sunny afternoons so people would not freak out:)

Of course when we actually HAD a tornado, it never went off until 3 hours afterwards, and they had a hell of a time turning it off:(