False alarm
False alarm
100 comments
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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.)
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Midwesterner that gets noon on Friday tests here. I got the joke tho.
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Ours is Mondays!
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But what if a tornado actually appears at that time?
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The image says what happens. It can't hurt you, it's against the rules.
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They cancel it if the weather isn’t good, just in case they need it for real.
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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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Then the Tornado Guards will shoo it away.
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Then they nuke the tornado
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you would know, it's almost always done during clear weather.
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It runs for maybe a minute at 1pm. If it goes off before or after, it's not a test.
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Like in 2017 in Mexico when the earthquake happened like two hours after their yearly earthquake drill. People figured it out pretty quickly, but I've never been in a tornado so I don't know if it'd be as easy to tell as an earthquake.
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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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Ours get tested on Saturday
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I lived in a small farm town on the Mississippi river in the Midwest for years. Their siren would literally go off at 6pm every, single, day. (Albeit very briefly) Something about letting people outside know it was time to head home for supper.
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Sundown towns... were all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States... The term came into use because of signs that directed "colored people" to leave town by sundown.
The towns of Minden and Gardnerville in Nevada had an ordinance from 1917 to 1974 that required Native Americans to leave the towns by 6:30 p.m. each day. A whistle, later a siren, was sounded at 6 p.m. daily, alerting Native Americans to leave by sundown. In 2021, the state of Nevada passed a law prohibiting the appropriation of Native American imagery by the mascots of schools, and the sounding of sirens that were once associated with sundown ordinances. Despite this law, Minden continued to play its siren for two more years, claiming that it was a nightly tribute to first responders.
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1pm local time on the first Wednesday of the month in my state.
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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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Thunderstorms on test days are always more fun.
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Every so often while working retail we would get an out-of-towner in the store while that happens.
They lose their shit and panic.
One time at a sports store, a guy heard the sirens at the checkout counter and just left the cart and booked it for his car. I guess he figured he would outrun anything coming at him...
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We have the same but like for enemy invasion, the test is not like the real thing though but just short bursts.
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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 😁"
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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
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Wow, what an alarm, huh.
Lemon, it's Tuesday.
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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.
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I have never met someone so passionate about a siren before
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I have some Greeks I’d like to introduce you to.
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There are some really interesting YouTube channels about different types of sirens.
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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.
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Bro there's a Canadian guy on Youtube who built a loud-ass siren out of plywood in his garage. No speakers. No fancy electronics. Just a motor and some wood. These do not need to be complex things.
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Exactly. A basic electric mechanical siren just consists of a motor, a centrifugal fan called a chopper, and a stator to chop the air as the rotor spins. It can't get any simpler than that. There are tons of mechanical sirens from the 1920s and 30s that are still in service today because of how basic and easy to maintain they are!
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Links?
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We just get noon at the first Monday of the month. But it's an air alarm, not tornado.
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To be fair tornados are notoriously bad at keeping apointments
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It makes sense, really. Where are they going to put their watch? At the narrow part at the bottom?
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Unlike the Germans
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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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It's not just a law, I think it's in the constitution. Beatrix even does it every Liberation Day
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OH SHIT THE AIR IS COMING
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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.
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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.
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It means the Boches are at it again!
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that means it's already over for Poland and Belgium
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Wait till they hear about the reverse tornadoes that build houses and straighten out all the trees.
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They're turning the friggin' trees straight!
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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.
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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?
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Around here it's the first Tuesday of every month.
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Small town I used to live in would run an old air raid siren every single day at noon.
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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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It's interesting that people still ring something around noon. In my European country it's common practice in every town/village (even in big cities) to ring the church bell at 12 o' clock, but that's a tradition from waaaaay back when not everyone could have a timekeeping device. We also have an air raid siren (mostly because of a "nearby" nuclear reactor), which also gets tested, but only about once a month.
EDIT: What the fuck did I do? I just said it was interesting that while in a different form, noon time ringing is still a thing in 2025. Sorry if that offended someone.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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."
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My company tests their fire alarm on Fridays. We are so fucked if we ever actually have a fire on Friday.
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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.
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As a midwesterner, it’s the first Tuesday of the month at 10 AM. At least for my state.
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For us, it's the first Saturday of the month at 1pm
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It's storm weather awareness week, so they've been running the alarms at random times here outside of Minneapolis. Thankfully, each town does it at different times, and when it's a real alarm we get it from all directions, so it's easy to tell the difference.
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Heard them all go off at 6:45pm yesterday and had a moment of concern when I realized it was Thursday before looking it up.
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Yeah, if they all went off at once, I'd have a minor panic attack. We live in the burbs on the county border, and there are 3 town centers almost equidistant from us; and another 2 within hearing distance. When it's real, they all go off, from all directions, but the towns don't synchronize their tests except for the weekly one, and it's obvious when it's just a random township test.
We have a perfect tornado room: no windows, in the basement, but the first time we had one we'd just moved here from Pennsylvania. We have two cats and with all of the alarms I spent a dozen minutes chasing one down, getting it into the room with my wife, then going for the other... and the first time, the first cat escaped while I was coming in with the second so I had to go back out and capture it again. And then, when we're all comfortably settled in the room, my wife casually says, "you know, you really should go get my purse so we have credit cards." So out I go again, up two floors to find the purse. By then, it looked like Wizard of Oz outside the windows, like nothing I'd ever seen: no visibility, and green. I've been in hurricanes before, and as terrifying as they are, they've hit nothing on tornados for sheer weird.
Anyway, the tornado passed us by, no damage to the family or property, but I'm less eager to experience another one than I used to be.
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MI here, we test ours the first Saturday of the month
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Have a guest from Florida atm, and it still scares her every time lol
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MI as well. Most towns I’ve seen test them on Saturday, but I have seen one that tested them on Wednesday.
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Me living near a nuclear plant, hearing sirens but then realizing it’s a Wednesday at 10 AM.
The power company now has a service that sends a text message on days they’re testing the siren, which is helpful. They won’t use it for an actual emergency, I assume because an actual emergency alert would go out.
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Live in Oklahoma. Sirens get tested daily at noon. State doesn't fuck around.
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Every day??
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Most days have a Noon, yes.
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oklahoma is tornado alley central. You kinda have to down there.
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Yep, you always know when noon hits. If you're outside of course. It's not too disruptive inside.
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Everyone knows that tornados never touch down on Wednesdays at noon. When they do... well, we're fucked.
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Reminds me of the coincidence in Mexico City's earthquake warning system. Mexico City runs an earthquake drill every year on September 19, the anniversary of the deadly 1985 Mexico City earthquake.
Well in 2017 there actually was another deadly earthquake on that same day, 2 hours after the official drill, the sirens went off for the second time that day, as the ground started shaking. There wasn't enough advance warning to actually have people disregard it as a false alarm, though, because by the time the sirens went off the earthquake could already be felt.
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Tuesday for me
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First Tuesday of the month and at 10am.
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Oooh, I get to share my favorite link to Creepy Chicago Sirens
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Happy birthday Trevor Henderson.
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Fun fact: despite the videos claiming the sirens were broken, they actually weren't. The sirens (Federal Signal Modulators) were performing the Alternate Wail signal, a combination of the Wail and Hi-Lo signals. All Federal Signal electronic speaker sirens can perform this signal, as well as the mechanical Thunderbolt 1003 and 3T22 sirens also made by the same company. Chicago sadly switched to the standard Wail signal years back.
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Ours are usually on the first Wednesday of the month, but we had a scheduled one this week on Thursday and it scared the shit out of me.
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We get the tornado alarm test on the first Monday of the month at noon. Hope one never hits at that time, because nobody would bat an eye.
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tornado sirens on a noon during wednesday: chill tornado sirens at literally any other time: oh, oh no.
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Interesting We have tsunami sirens on Wednesday here on the pacific coast
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Nah just check the time, if it's noon you're good. If it ain't noon you check the news and make sure it isn't a scheduled one at 10am for some test because they're planning to replace the sirens with new equipment. If it ain't that because the internet's out then it's probably real but if not you got a moment to see if it's real for another reason
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If I'm an ambitious tornado, I'mma touch down exactly at Noon on Wednesday. Y'all'n't seen that coming didja?
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I legit think that every time I hear it "if I was a tornado thisd be when I'd do it tell ya hwhat"
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Start by checking the weather outside. If it's sunny and clear, no tornado. If not, start looking - places I've been at least, they've been reluctant to test if there's even much cloud coverage.
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A similar thing applies for Sweden, where there's a quarterly test of the public emergency warning system, which always happens at 15:00 on Mondays.
The system has the nickname "Hesa Fredrik" ("Hoarse Fredrik").
Since this system will be used in case of an attack in the event of a war, this means we have to contemplate if Russia is attacking or if it's just Monday each time we hear the signal.
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First monday of the month for my area
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We test every first Monday at 11am, but after the siren, there's a voice saying that it's a test, broadcasted over the entire city. It was pretty eerie the first time I heard it.
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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.
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