growing up near SAC bases like barksdale... second saturday of every month started with them testing the END OF THE WORLD sirens. if this siren went off any other time than a second saturday, kiss your ass goodbye, multiple megatons are incoming.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Same in France, the test the fire station siren every first Wednesday of each month.
The problem is, I have no idea what it means if the sirens go off at any other moment.
Get inside close all the doors and windows and listen on the radio to the gov communication I guess ?
Do you think i have a radio at home ? I don't even have a TV.
If internet goes down I'm losing all my communications with it.
Ho I know, that's the irony of this imho. In stuff that nobody has, there is also this emergency bag that you are supposed to check once per year : Link
I should really do that.
LMAO, they test the sirens once a month on Wednesday, for anyone unfamiliar.
(Edited, I live real close to one, but I don't really pay attention to the day or frequency. Tons of trains around too, you learn to drown it out.)
Midwesterner that gets noon on Friday tests here. I got the joke tho.
Ours is Mondays!
But what if a tornado actually appears at that time?
The image says what happens. It can't hurt you, it's against the rules.
They cancel it if the weather isn’t good, just in case they need it for real.
They'll likely run a different signal than the normal test. If, for example, they normally test in "alert" (steady) then they might use the "attack" (wavering up and down) signal instead.
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Depends on the region. Some places will test it on noon on Sundays. The place I'm currently at will test it once a month on Wednesday at 11 am.
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Around here it's the first Tuesday of every month.
One time a friend and I went to Oahu to visit another guy, and he missed when we talked about the monthly test of the tsunami warning that was scheduled that day. He was out swimming by himself when the thing went off, and he started swimming back to shore like a maniac. I never saw a guy swim so fast in my life LOL. He kept glancing over his shoulder expecting a tsunami to be bearing down on him. Right about the time the siren stopped he came stumbling and staggering out of the water, coughing and gagging, and there we were sitting on the sand laughing our asses off. Good times.
My company tests their fire alarm on Fridays. We are so fucked if we ever actually have a fire on Friday.
During one of the fire drills when I was going to school, one teacher was like "we should test whether the smoke alarms actually work" and lit a small fire in a small metal bin. Plot twist was that the smoke detectors on this side of the school did not work, but when the smoke got to the other side of the school it worked and triggered the alarm. Only at that time all the pupils were already on their way back into the building again and panicked when they noticed smoke and a new alarm.
My area tests the NPP's sirens the first Monday of every month and now I just tune it out which worries me. Hopefully if it ever sounds in a weird time my brain picks up something's very wrong.
I do sometimes feel like it would be better if they didn't test these things so much. So that when they went off they were actually a shock when they were used for real as they're supposed to be.
There is a nuclear power station near me and they always sound the siren on the last Friday of every month at 10am, when I first moved to the area every time it went off I always used to have to go and check the calendar because I was never 100% clear if it was or wasn't the last Friday of the month. But after a while I just stopped checking the calendar, so at some point I'm probably going to get irradiated. I suppose with hurricanes there are at least visual clues that a hurricane might be happening, what does a melting down power station look like?
Coastal area checking in, same thing for the tsunami alarms. I had some good fun with a tourist when, after they asked what the droning sound was, I replied with "Oh, it's just the tsunami alarm" and then didn't react to it. They were visibly nervous, so I waited a sec and then said "It's just a test 😁"
What's a real mindfuck is going from one place to the other. SF tsunami alarms are on Tuesdays. So you have a brief moment of panic, then a brief moment of calm, and then a brief moment of EXTREME PANIC when you realize what day it is, and then calm again when you realize what state you're in
Wow, what an alarm, huh.
Lemon, it's Tuesday.
The last two places I've lived choose a specific Wednesday of the month to test, and always at noon.
They still test in rain, so every so often you still feel that mild panic again until you look at the clock.
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Bit of a rant about my city's system: Our sirens are tested weekly on Mondays, since we live around a lot of chemical and petro plants that can release some nasty stuff if something goes wrong. Haven't had any serious warnings since I moved here years ago, but the sirens themselves can't exactly be relied on either.
Problem is, our system consists of "High Power Speaker Station" (HPSS-32) sirens made by a company called ATI Systems. Holy fuck these sirens are garbage. Speakers manufactured in China that leak rainwater inside and short out the drivers, controllers that completely lack redundancy if one or both of the amplifiers fail, which renders it only half as loud or entirely silent. ATI refuses to support older hardware and forces the city to buy new controllers when the old ones die within a decade, causing the maintenance costs to outweigh having just gone with a less scummy manufacturer.
ATI itself is a horrible company that basically suckers cities into buying their junk by undercutting legitimate manufacturers, then leaves cities hanging when their sirens start rapidly failing. San Francisco recently had to remove their entire system of HPSS16 and HPSS32 units because the system kept failing and had a ton of security vulnerabilities. The system didn't even last two decades, yet the Cold War era STL-10 mechanical sirens they replaced had served the city without issue for half a century.
So yeah, I don't exactly feel safe with our current system. If your city has ATI sirens, don't count on them in an emergency and get a weather radio instead.
I have never met someone so passionate about a siren before
I have some Greeks I’d like to introduce you to.
There's a whole community of siren enthusiasts like myself, there's thousands of us. Sirens are really neat machines that have a ton of interesting history and unique models. It's a niche hobby for sure, but I have no shame in sharing it.
I was super into sirens myself for a while. After they killed my third boat crew, I had to move on to another hobby.
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We just get noon at the first Monday of the month. But it's an air alarm, not tornado.
Found a fellow dutchie. Also it's the law that at least one person says "the Germans are coming!" When we hear it.
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Small town I used to live in would run an old air raid siren every single day at noon.
It's a common tradition for small towns to keep their old noon whistles going, decades after they stopped being used for their original purpose. There are tons of 1920s, 30s and 40s-era sirens that are still used every day as noon whistles, as well as some Cold War era stuff.
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The town I live in would run the tornado/fire siren (it was the same siren but with a different pattern for how long it would be run for to call the volunteer firefighters to the station whenever there's a really bad emergency) as a noon whistle every day. Around 2018 or 2019 they stopped doing the noon whistle, but never instituted regular testing so we've had super irregular tornado sirens when they are needed. During one really bad storm half the sirens failed to go off at all (fortunately the tornados jumped over town. There were tornados west of us, then tornados east of us but somehow none in town) then the following storm the tornados for half the town failed to go off. They've been testing irregularly since then but I'd really prefer if they performed monthly tests
Monthly or even weekly tests are definitely preferable. You don't want to wait until a serious emergency to find out the motor locked up or the controller doesn't work.
My country used to have those every first wednesday of a month at exactly 12:00. And then they would anounce that its a syren test.
Now they've swapped it. Apperantly due to Ukranian refugies being scared that there is bombing.
But still, if you want to bomb us, 12:00 on wendnesday is your spot.
As a midwesterner, it’s the first Tuesday of the month at 10 AM. At least for my state.
For us, it's the first Saturday of the month at 1pm
Wait till they hear about the reverse tornadoes that build houses and straighten out all the trees.
They're turning the friggin' trees straight!
Them's the rules.
Its also pretty convenient because the tests are really short. So if they go long, you get your ass to cover because you're all like "uuhhhhh wtf man it's Wednesday."
Interesting We have tsunami sirens on Wednesday here on the pacific coast
Everyone knows that tornados never touch down on Wednesdays at noon. When they do... well, we're fucked.
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