# Siren Malfunction



## eageeye86 (Jun 24, 2009)

This is what happens when you drive through a flooded roadway with the siren on. It died at first, but then when we were leaving the hospital it started coming back to life...but we had it turned off. Most of the time we run lights without the siren, instead we were running sirens without lights. Needless to say, people were getting confused. LOL We ended up turning the lights on just to look normal... Everyone on board was laughing hysterically.  



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArQtus0vXqU

(Embedding the video didn't work so here's the link instead.)


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## lightsandsirens5 (Jun 25, 2009)

Ha! Remind me to not do that!

Between 43 sec and 48 sec would actually make a pretty cool siren tone. Take out around 1/2 of the bubbles and the whole thing would be rather attention getting.

THe siren on oune of our SAR/Extrication rigs has some sort of electrical malfunction going on, but it sounds really cool. The wail part and the yelp part are fine, but the hyper-yelp tone is a weird combination of the siren and electric air-horn. It is really neat and I think it would make a great siren tone.

Kind of a side note, does anyone have the Hi-Lo European sounding siren on their rig? We have it on one of our brush trucks and I think it works great. Really grabs attention. people are proably thinking: "What the heck is that?"^_^


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## eageeye86 (Jun 25, 2009)

Oh yeah thats not all. Just after I drove through the water, (which I'm sure washed the top of the rig!) all the siren was doing was a static-y growl. (and it was a full on cardiac arrest call) I had to go through the rest of the traffic lights and pass cars with just the standard Ford horn. (the crew was laughing at just that lol)
So we leave the hospital, and we stop at a gas station with the medic unit to grab some coffee. The medic makes fun of us saying "well our siren works" and he blips their siren. We start heading back to our station and we start hearing the static-y growl again. But the power to the siren is off! We pull over on a hill and get out to take a look at the siren and a little bit of water is running out of it. Theres nothing we can do about it so keep going. Thats when it starts coming back to life. We call the medic unit back to have a look at the siren. We are all standing there laughing our ***'s off. At the end of the video where the siren is just a constant high tone, it stayed like that. We ended up stuffing a towel in it and followed the medic unit so we could turn our lights off. Ended up having to take it out of service and switch duty rigs. The rig is still out of service. The siren now doesn't do anything and we can't find a replacement yet. It definitely was a light-hearted way to end a stressful call.


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## JPINFV (Jun 25, 2009)

Did you try turning off the battery switch to turn it off?


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## eageeye86 (Jun 25, 2009)

This particular rig is an old one. (I think it's a '96) The battery switch has to be on for the rig to run. It switches the entire power for the rig.


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## WuLabsWuTecH (Jun 25, 2009)

Are you kicking it in the video there?


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## eageeye86 (Jun 27, 2009)

Nope, I was the one taking the video. That was one of the other crew members. We ended up having four people on the crew. Its a paid volunteer company, so when they heard it go out as a cardiac arrest, the captain and one other went to the scene.


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## WuLabsWuTecH (Jun 27, 2009)

haha!  But i laught that someone thought kicking it would be an effective solution!


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## eageeye86 (Jun 27, 2009)

Actually, we had kicked it several times before the video and it helped drain some of the water out of it. But it was just perfect that when she kicked it, it changed the siren's tone.


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## el Murpharino (Jul 1, 2009)

That can't be good for your ears...prolonged exposure to those levels without earplugs.


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## Small_Town_EMT (Jul 21, 2009)

We have an ambulance that has a similar problem - even without the water.  Hit a bump just right, and the lights/siren/both will come on.  If you shut the power switch off, without the key being turned all the way off, the lights and siren will turn on, and slowly dim down as the power is bled out of the lines.


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## PotatoMedic (Jul 22, 2009)

Can I say that if our sirens were that eclectic then I think people would move over and pay attention.  Seems for me that people just ignore us even with L/S. :wacko:


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