The Siren Board

Back in the old civil defence systems, CLM's and the Los angeles systems, did they care much about siren placement (science behind sound travel etc.) or did they just put small sirens in small areas? I know civil defence did survey's, but not to the extent that ATI and other companies do it, or did they?

Hard to say. They probably just put them in fairly populated areas and didn't worry about future community growth. A lot of old sirens were placed at fire stations because they were centrally located in most towns. Also at schools to warn them of impending doom.

Where I live, they seem to be in pretty weird places, which makes me think there may be some strategy to the placement, next time I can, I'll get a video of the ambience.

Columbus GA's initial system of 5 A2 Thunderbolt 1000ATs (5M blower) and 7 SD-10s were bought some time in the 1960s. The Thunderbolts were at fire stations, two of which were remounted to metal poles and one possibly to a concrete pole, and from the looks of it the SD-10s went up on school campuses. The other installations that went up, 5 A2 Thunderbolt 1000ATs (4M blower) and 10 SD-10s, probably were installed in the 70's. It seems like they were based off of population and range of the sirens as indicated in the study conducted in 1981 for new sirens. I think our 2001s and any other Thunderbolts went up as upgrades for SD-10 installations while the replaced sirens were relocated to areas that needed coverage ex. Columbus State University SD-10. When McCord came around they based their system on the geography of the area with population in mind, adding in an extra siren to cover a gap and using 4 different models. Ft. Benning's old system was probably done the same way, where the Whelen installs by McCord were done like ours, except that McCord used three models and apparently doesn't install 4000 Watt arrays anymore.

Ok then, so it seems like to me it didn't really matter where, but there were surveys done. It's just alot of siren pictures to me seem awkward why they were put there, because of how much has changed from the 60's and 70's. I was also wondering why civil defence sirens were also installed on fire departments, but that was answered.

DeKalb County, Georgia put their Thunderbolts mostly north of I-20, which is a very heavily populated area. There were only around 2 or maybe 3 south of the highway.

A little bit of unrelated trivia, my mom actually lived up the road from a thunderbolt back when she was in high school, which was the mid 1970's.

I don't know about the original CD days, but I know from my siren hunt that most cities use a fairly smart coverage range. Most civilization will be covered, and generally, where coverages meet they will be at about 70-80% of the sirens stated range.

Louisville, Ky actually has a great map (within...acceptable parameters) here that shows their ranges of the sirens in there system. Gives you a little bit of an idea how a city like this lays out their setup