Fire Alarm Boxes Becoming Another Technology Casualty

Feb 26, 2008 4:27 PM

The street corner fire alarm box, a lifeline used when few people had telephones at home to report fires, has become another casualty of technology, replaced by the 9-1-1 emergency system and cell phones.

The bright red and white boxes with peaked "roofs" once dotted street corners throughout the United States. Now, sometime in the next three months, the Village of Lancaster, N.Y., will likely become one of the last suburban municipalities to bid a fond goodbye to the American icon.

According to New York's Buffalo News, if this occurs, the Village of Depew, N.Y., will become the sole remaining suburban holdout in New York's Erie County relying on a fully functioning street box alarm system. Depew's dates back to 1894—the year of the village's incorporation.

"It's hard to let go, because it's sort of a tradition—they give you a warm, comfortable feeling," says Lancaster Mayor William G. Cansdale Jr., who remembers eyeing his street corner fire alarm as a boy and wondering what it would be like to pull the lever inside.

Lancaster's 88 street alarm boxes—most fastened to rough wooden poles encircled with red and white rings—sustained heavy damage in an October 2006 surprise snowstorm. Federal dollars helped repair some, but the Village Board remains torn about spending another $12,000 to fix the rest.

"We're waiting for the Fire Department to tell us what they think is in the best interest of the community," Cansdale says. "We're willing to go along with whatever the department wants."

Many local fire departments abandoned their box alarm systems in the 1980s and 1990s. Antique boxes tend to land in fire museums or on eBay, where on a recent day of Internet haggling, collectors offered between $10 and $249 for these compact monuments to firefighting history.

Cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have long since dismantled their fire alarm box systems. But the boxes still have staunch defenders in some large cities across the country.

New York City still has them, though former Mayor Rudy Giuliani fought hard for three years of his administration to ditch them.

A federal judge ruled in 1997 that getting rid of the boxes violated the civil rights of the city's 65,000 deaf and hearing-impaired residents.

The Boston Globe ran a story explaining why the firefighters in Beantown, Mass., flatly refuse to scrap the 1,259 fire box alarms that send hook and ladder companies scurrying to a blaze.

"Technology has advanced, but they still have a place," John P. Henderson, Boston's superintendent of fire alarms, is quoted as saying in the story.

Boston's fire box system operates separately from electric and telephone lines and isn't affected by power outages, downed phone lines, bad cell phone reception or radio interference, Henderson says. If a major disaster knocked out power in Boston for several days and people couldn't charge cell phones, the boxes constitute a public safety lifeline in a large city.

The City of Buffalo still has about 450 working fire alarm boxes left in service. Most of those are "master" boxes located inside of schools, hospitals and nursing homes.

A smattering of fire alarm boxes also continue to dot Buffalo street corners, according to the Buffalo Fire Department's Fire Alarm Office. But most residential box alarms in Buffalo have long since been dismantled.

Inside the boxes, which are wired in a series like some Christmas lights, a notched code wheel turns and transmits a telegraph code whenever a fire box's lever is pulled. If it's Box 37, three notches on the wheel are followed by an empty interval and then by seven notches. In the past, firefighters who heard those alarms knew just what box triggered it.

Nowadays, the majority of fire calls come in to municipalities when people dial 9-1-1 on their cell phones or landlines. Pagers and sophisticated radio systems are used to alert firefighters.

"We prefer that people call in fires on a cell phone anyway," Hamburg, N.Y., Police Chief Carmen Kesner told the Buffalo News, "because they can give us up-to-the-second information about the fire."

In Boston, a team of 20 firefighters is required to keep 1,700 street alarm boxes in working order. In villages like 11,000-resident Lancaster, devoting manpower to maintain the street boxes and track down spare parts has become too much of a chore and no longer makes financial sense.

"We phased out our fire alarm boxes three or four years ago," says North Tonawanda, N.Y., Fire Capt. William DeMonte. Prior to that, a team of two to three firefighters was required to test and tinker with the fire alarm boxes on a daily basis. "That's a cost," he says.

In the Village of Lancaster, costs are likewise a concern for 3rd Ward Trustee William C. Schroeder, who once served as fire chief and has tinkered with the village's box alarm repairs himself over the past 30 years.

"We were probably spending $8,000 to $10,000 a year in maintenance on the boxes," he says, adding that false alarms sounded by the system were numerous.

In October 2006, Mother Nature added another unpredictable cost. After the devastating storm, Lancaster's trustees realized they faced an unavoidable financial showdown with the village's antique fire alarm system.

Today, most of the village's boxes are bagged in somber black plastic, awaiting their fate.

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