Mon Dec 01, 2014 10:15 pm
I don't know if this is true or not, but when I bought my Thunderbolt from West Shore, Jeff mentioned that most of the Federal sirens installed in Texas in the early 80's were installed by West Shore. And considering the fact that places like Cedar Hill, Carrollton, Lewisville, etc have/had pretty much identical setups to some of the later Dallas sirens (which WSS allegedly did as well) I have always been under the impression that West Shore did all of them. The only thing I never understood, or how this came to be, was that Lewisville's sirens were on a Computlert System. Like they ordered the T-bolts and refitted them with Compulert controls. I have no idea why they did this, and it must have been quite a lot of money to do. Lewisville had no real organized system before the Thunderbolts went up in 1981.
Back on topic, to summarize; If they are on a metal poles of that design, and are installed in that fashion, WSS probably did the work. They have done so many around here that I remember being a little surprised when I saw my first wood pole mounted Thunderbolt. I also had no idea how they worked back then.
(My four-year-old self asked my mom how she thought they worked and she came up with some crazy arse theory that it was like a gramophone and that all the noise was made down in the bottom [blower box] and used the pole as an amplifier and came out of the horn at the top and that's why it was so loud. I guess she deserves credit for correctly guessing the source of the "loudness.")
-The Princess