The Siren Board

These are a couple videos I shot of the Fire Station 212 and Kingswood Water Tower Thunderbolts on July 3rd and August 7th of 2013 in Cedar Hill, Texas. They test them the first Wednesday of the month at 2:00pm. I haven't been back since, and seeing as over a year ago there was already a 128 adjacent to the Kingswood Thunderbolt I'm kinda leery of doing so. They're the only operational Thunderbolts I know of in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and hopefully won't be removed for awhile, although I'm not holding my breath.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNBiR2BuCzA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJYxp00rA00

Do y'all know of any more functional t-bolts in the Dallas/Fort Worth, or central/north Texas area?

bigtuna7O wrote:Do y'all know of any more functional t-bolts in the Dallas/Fort Worth, or central/north Texas area?

Ennis, TX (South of Dallas on I-45) still uses their system of Thunderbolts. They just retrofitted them with ASC Compulert controllers.

Thanks a lot! They look identical to the Cedar Hill Thunderbolts; maybe they're restored units from the old Dallas system?

From what I understand they (Cedar Hill) kind of share a common system with Duncanville. There is an SD-10 that was part of the system at one time that I don't believe is used anymore. I went to it one day trying to capture some video of it for a test but it didn't go off. They also have a model 7, and then a few 2001's and Modulators as part of the Duncanville system. The SD-10 is located at the high school football stadium.

Is the SD-10 still located there? I heard rumors it was removed so I haven't bothered going out there to look, but if that's not the case I may go see it next time I'm in the area.

bigtuna7O wrote:Is the SD-10 still located there? I heard rumors it was removed so I haven't bothered going out there to look, but if that's not the case I may go see it next time I'm in the area.

It's gone unfortunately. They took it down about a year or two ago.

Sorry for the thread bump. Those installs look very similar to the Dallas system of T-bolts. Maybe installed around the same time by the same install company.

siren fan wrote:Those installs look very similar to the Dallas system of T-bolts. Maybe installed around the same time by the same install company.

I found an old emergency management document that says the Cedar Hill units were installed in 1985, which is a lot newer than the old Dallas system. Maybe the Dallas system's poles were going to crap so they revamped them with newer metal pipes in the 80s around the time Cedar Hill were getting them installed? The two cities share a county, I'm pretty sure, so the fact that the two systems are similar in construction makes sense.

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.")