Middlefield FD Notifies Residents of New Emergency Sirens

The Middlefield Volunteer Fire Department would like to notify residents about some improvements to the siren alerting system. The Department has three alerting sirens located throughout the town. The sirens supplement the pager notification system used by the Valley Shore Dispatch Center and provide a secondary means of notification to our emergency responders. Due to the town’s varying topography, there are many dead spots that the pagers cannot receive the notification of an emergency. 

The Fire department is in the process of converting the existing siren located at the intersection of High Street and Way Road into a fire emergency notification siren. This will replace the siren that was located on top of the former Lyman Gunsight building. The new location should improve coverage to the west end of the town due to the increase in its elevation. The department will maintain the existing siren locations behind the firehouse and the one located in Rockfall, at Main Street and Cherry Hill Road. 

The new sirens were obtained by the town through a STEAP grant. The sirens are the latest design and function entirely by solar panels mounted to the poles. This will provide the town with a cost savings of electricity that was required for the existing units. This will also provide continuous operation at all time. This is a necessary improvement especially in light of the recent outages caused by Hurricane Irene. The sirens also have the capability of sending voice messages out. This could be used in case of an impending emergency weather condition or other pertinent messages to protect all residents. The normal alerting tone will be three high to low tones sounding lasting thirty seconds. The installation should be completed in the next few weeks with the sirens activating shortly there after.  

To read a previous Patch report on the sirens, click .