Rare ACA Allertor Recording

[kuhlman3737]

Hey troy you may remember me sean kuhl, I miss these sirens just before I moved I was going down the street and all of a sudden on the corner of kentucky and 19th I saw some funny thing sticking above the trees and it was the new 2001's I was bummed because I knew the old sirens were the best and will miss them, when I was back in town caught one of the tests of the new ones and just not the same, I also have a few of the old recordings that you posted a while back. Though down here I know in urbandale there is a thunderbolt in very very good condition but have not caught it on test day yet to get a glimpse of the sucker otherwise all the other sirens are 128's and whelen's.

[acaallertorkid]

hey Sean! yah you lived like 4 blocks away from me. Wow i had no idea you were into sirens! Isn't it sad? I guess the only good thing about the new sirens is that there are a few more of them and they are a little bit more "planned" as opposed to just being thrown somewhere.

[kuhlman3737]

Haha yea I stumbled on the board like a year ago, this is true it is more planned and the coverage is better and they wont break down as much, I remember all the reports of them being down especially the problems with the thunderbeams. at least it is "planned" I think that would be the first for the city for anything haha.. o and by the way was that siren dead on the test and that is the first time I have heard the city set them off in attack.

[acaallertorkid]

i actually was caught off guard. i was in the kitchen and i heard it but i thought it was coming from the computer and then i realized it wasnt. and then i had to think for a second that it was weird they were blowing them in the middle of winter.. finally i came to my senses and started recording it, unfortunately i got the wind down of alert and the attack part. I remember as a kid they didn't set them off in attack but rather they ran alert like 3 times each for a minute a piece. And then you could almost ALWAYS hear each siren individually as they usually had to go and fix whatever was wrong with them. Did you know that a thunderbeam is still stuck on top of City Hall? you can see it if your headed east on 1st street NW, stopped at the light next to Wells Fargo. They were going to try to have it taken down while they were having the air conditioner fixed but the company doing the work said that they couldn't because of insurance reasons. So it there it sits, dead and probably never to sound again.

[kuhlman3737]

Yea I wondered why it still sat up there. Ill miss those allertors especially the one you taped on pierce and I didnt even realize niacc had one til like my junior year when I went there for tech prep and it was right by the facilities building. anyway it sucks but its all for the better. I didnt realize that they were in such bad shape that they basiclly were falling apart that was supprising to me.

[acaallertorkid]

well Pierce's allertor didn't even look to be in too bad of shape, but they started lowering and the top horn made a creaking noise... I started playing with the radio and looked up just in time to see it hit the ground, bounce and then it cracked like an egg. They had to have 2 men pick up both pieces. There was an allertor on the property of Alliant and it was the one that actually blew off its back casing. You could tell that siren was in disrepair though, the 2 telephone poles holding it up were tilting horribly. Did you know there was an old Banshee over by Newman that also had a federal 10/12 chopper in it? I discovered it when i was at a friends house, the motor was SHOT . i think it sounded about an octave lower than the allertors and never made it to full blast. it wound up and then just slowly wound down the whole time it was on.

[Gil]

Thats an interesting looking Banshee, in that it looks much primitive to the ones we're used to seeing. Could it be a very old model, or even a prototype/variant?

[kuhlman3737]

I did but correct me if im wrong, do you remember the old city hall I think that one used to sit on the old city hall back in the day the old pole it was mounted on is still there but after city hall moved they took it down and I noticed it out there about 4 or 5 years ago. but did not know it was in that bad of shape. How did the alliant allertor blow out its casing? that one i heard last sound in 2005 during the tornado warning in like march and it sounded good. I went to see what sirens we have near by since we just moved out by waukee we have 2 wps-2760's within a mile that is about it for sirens near by down here.

[acaallertorkid]

i talked to the head of emergency management one day at work and he said that one of the main reasons they were getting a new set of sirens is because a siren on the property of Alliant energy had blown its motor and completely destroyed the siren, and they were afraid the other sirens were going to go soon as well. so i drove by and sure enough the piece on the back was gone.
now that you mention it i do remember the siren on the old city hall!! is it the same one?! oh gosh i was in the Newman elementary parking lot and it was just nasty. i was in shock and of course i was really new to airraidsirens.com and so i planned a recording but i went back and the damn thing didnt go off because they're so bad at timing the tests... i was there at 11:00 and the sirens didn't go off until 1:30 i was pissed.... and so i forgot about it and then it was too late, the new sirens had already gone up and the old ones had already been cut.

[kuhlman3737]

Yea I know for a fact because I never noticed that one then it was there and i remember it well off the city hall cuz when I was little I thought it was a ufo. Anyway didnt know it was the reason why they took em down but it was about time plus the battery back up and radio controlled activation will make it safer and more reliable to mason city for once, im glad the stuck with electromechanical versus getting whelens I think they sound horrible. I was right under the one on hickman at the top of the hill here in des moines and it went off i was like good grief I do not like the sound at all.