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The
bright red and white boxes with peaked “roofs” once dotted
street corners throughout the area — providing a lifeline at a
time when few people had telephones at home to report fires.
Today
they are a casualty of the 911 emergency system
and the ubiquitous cell phone.
Sometime
in the next 90 days, the Village of Lancaster will likely become one of
the last suburban municipalities to bid a fond goodbye to an American
icon: the street corner fire alarm box.
If
so, the Village of Depew will become the sole remaining suburban
holdout in Erie County relying on a fully functioning street box alarm
system. Depew’s dates to 1894 — the year of the
village’s incorporation.
“It’s
hard to let go, because it’s sort of a tradition — they
give you a warm, comfortable feeling,” said Lancaster Mayor
William G. Cansdale Jr., who remembers eyeing
his street corner fire alarm as a boy and wondering what it would be
like to pull that lever inside.
Lancaster’s
88 street alarm boxes — most fastened to rough wooden poles
encircled with red and white rings — sustained heavy damage in
the October 2006 surprise snowstorm. Federal dollars helped repair
some, but the Village Board remains torn about spending another $12,000
to fix the rest.
“We’re
waiting for the Fire Department to tell us what they think is in the
best interest of the community,” Cansdale
said. “We’re willing to go along with whatever the
department wants.”
Many
local fire departments abandoned their box alarm systems in the 1980s
and 1990s. Antique boxes tend to land in their fire museums or on eBay,
where on a recent day of Internet haggling, collectors offered between
$10 and $249 for these compact monuments to fire-fighting history.
Cities
like Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have long since
dismantled their fire alarm box systems. But the boxes still have
staunch defenders in some large cities across the country.
New
York City still has them, though former Mayor Rudy Giuliani fought hard
for three years of his administration to ditch them.
A
federal judge ruled in 1997 that getting rid of the boxes violated the
civil rights of the city’s 65,000 deaf and hearing impaired
residents.
The
Boston Globe ran a lengthy story last month explaining why Beantown’s firefighters flatly refuse to
scrap the 1,259 fire box alarms that send hook and ladder companies
scurrying to a blaze.
“Technology
has advanced, but they still have a place,” John P. Henderson,
Boston’s Superintendent of Fire Alarms, is quoted as saying in
the Jan. 6 story by Globe staffer Emily Sweeney.
Boston’s
fire box system operates separately from electric and telephone lines
and isn’t affected by power outages, downed phone lines, bad cell
phone reception or radio interference, Henderson said. If a major
disaster knocked out power in Boston for several days and people
couldn’t charge cell phones, the boxes constitute a public safety
lifeline in a large city.
The
City of Buffalo still has about 450 working fire alarm boxes left in
service. Most of those are “master” boxes located inside of
schools, hospitals and nursing homes.
A smattering
of fire alarm boxes also continue to dot Buffalo street corners,
according to the Buffalo Fire Department’s Fire Alarm Office. But
most residential box alarms in Buffalo — like the one at Broadway
and Pine Street that alerted firefighters to the spectacular 1986
church fire immortalized in Rich Blake’s “The Day Donny
Herbert Woke Up” — have long since been dismantled.
In
many smaller towns, firefighters say, the antique boxes have outlived
their usefulness, generating too many false alarms and costing too much
to maintain.
Still,
they are remembered wistfully by fire departments that have scrapped
them.
Lockport
abandoned the box alarms lining its streets and protecting its schools
and nursing homes in the early 1990s, according to Capt. Michael
Collette.
“I
can still remember hearing those alarms come in — twice, then
three times, then twice for the nursing homes,” Collette said.
Inside
the boxes, which are wired in a series like some Christmas lights, a
notched code wheel turns and transmits a telegraph code whenever a fire
box’s lever is pulled. If it’s Box 37, three notches on the
wheel are followed by an empty interval and then by seven notches. In
days gone by, firefighters who heard those alarms knew just what box
triggered it.
Nowadays
the majority of fire calls come in to municipalities when people dial
911 on their cell phones or land lines. Pagers and sophisticated radio
systems are used to alert firefighters.
“We
prefer that people call in fires on a cell phone anyway,” said
Hamburg Police Chief Carmen Kesner,
“because they can give us up-to-the-second information about the
fire.”
In
Boston, Mass., a team of 20 firefighters is required to keep 1,700
street alarm boxes in working order. In villages like 11,000-resident
Lancaster, devoting manpower to maintain the street boxes and track
down spare parts has become too much of a chore and no longer makes
financial sense.
“We
phased out our fire alarm boxes three or four years ago,” said
North Tonawanda Fire Capt. William DeMonte.
Prior to that, a team of two to three firefighters was required to test
and tinker with the fire alarm boxes on a daily basis.
“That’s a cost,” he said.
In
the Village of Lancaster, costs are likewise a concern for 3rd Ward
Trustee William C. Schroeder, who once served as fire chief and has
tinkered with the village’s box alarm repairs himself over the
past 30 years.
“We
were probably spending $8,000 to $10,000 a year in maintenance on the
boxes,” he said, adding that false alarms sounded by the system
were numerous.
In
October 2006, Mother Nature added another unpredictable cost. After the
devastating storm, Lancaster’s trustees realized they faced an
unavoidable financial showdown with the village’s antique fire
alarm system.
Today,
most of the village’s boxes are bagged in somber black plastic,
awaiting their fate.
One
of the quaintest fire alarms in the center of town, however, remains
functional:
RAISE
COVER PULL LEVER reads the lettering on the iron pedestal-mounted box in
front of Lancaster Town Hall. On its side are cautionary words:
“A false alarm can cost a human life.”
In
the end, trustee Schroeder says, the fate of the boxes may come down to
a compromise in the Village of Lancaster.
Perhaps,
he said, alarm boxes will remain only in front of Town Hall and the
village’s fire houses. Perhaps an audible siren activated by
radio will continue to sound throughout the village whenever
there’s a fire call.
As
Cansdale said, it will be hard to say
goodbye.
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