The FD pull boxes in my small city of 40,000 souls were removed. FD claimed too many false alarms, especially in the low income areas of the city.
News article on the subject from local paper Steve N2UBP
------------- Middletown retires out-of-date fire alarm system By Kristina Wells
Times Herald-Record March 30, 2007
Middletown =3F Mr. G. Kirby pulled the very first fire alarm box in this city. His tug on box No. 34 at Mill and Harding streets alerted firefighters to a blaze at the Monhagen Straw Hat Works. That was 120 years ago.
And just like Mr. Kirby, the Gamewell Co. fire alarm boxes soon will be long gone.
Middletown's alarm pull boxes are going the way of the bucket brigade and the horse-drawn wagon.
On April 9, the city will begin decommissioning the estimated 150 fire alarm boxes. Many of them have been off-line for years and are beyond repair. To fix the antiquated system =3F first activated in February 1888 =3F would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And in this era of E-911, pagers and cell phones, a pull box hard-wired to the central fire house and horn is an obsolete way to notify firefighters. The horns will remain active as an alert system in a citywide emergency, said Jacob Tawil, city public works commissioner.
"It's a tradition," he said of the pull boxes. "It breaks somebody's heart to pull them down."
Businesses with pull boxes on site were notified of the change in February and encouraged to update alarm systems to automatically alert the fire department through phone lines of an emergency. Also, three Middletown School District buildings are being retrofitted to do just that, at a cost of about $5,000, said Superintendent Ken Eastwood. Residents will have to either call 911 or the central fire house directly.
The technology is old and so is the issue of what to do with the pull boxes. For years, city officials have debated, weighing progress against tradition and history.
"It's an outdated technology," said Peter Laskaris, city historian. "That was the best they had at the time."
A study done in 2003 by then city Fire Inspector Rich Duncanson put the cost of saving the outdated system at nearly $250,000. Back then, Duncanson =3F who retired earlier this month =3F called upon city officials to do away with the pull boxes.
The pull boxes are ripe for abuse as well. A 1991 study by an engineering firm found the boxes were "constantly breaking" and the primary source for false alarms. Even back in 1888, when the boxes first went online, false alarms happened, according to a 1959 local history book called "Brave Men and Bright Machines." The book tells of a pull on box No. 23, sounding the alarm for a fire in a pile of cornstalks.
Turns out, a boy set the fire himself. Seems he wanted to hear the bell toll.
For more information on the decommissioning of the fire boxes, check out the city's Web site at