Background
In early 2017, Hollidaysburg Borough residents were informed that the Phoenix Volunteer Fire Department (PVFD) had raised more than $10,000 for the restoration of a WW2-era siren to be used for local emergency alerts. The siren, which stopped working around 2006, had been placed atop the old firehouse on the Hollidaysburg Diamond. The re-installation brought it to the new fire station on Wayne Street.
Proponents, including then-PVFD president David Zeek, told Borough Council that the restored siren would only go off for fires within the Borough, no more than a few times a month. The owner of Buster’s Six-Pack Shop in Hollidaysburg also came out strongly for the siren, saying that the 2014 fire on the 100 block of Allegheny St. could have been deadly without it, had the fire happened at night. The new siren also had the enthusiastic support of Mayor Joe Dodson.
Critics at the time wondered whether the siren would serve any functional purpose, as local firefighters were all equipped with pagers and/or cell phones to respond to calls. It was unclear that any firefighters lived within earshot of the siren. Borough Council, nonetheless, voted to allow the re-installation.
Once the siren became operative, it became clear that:
- The siren goes off as frequently as 40 times per month, often in the middle of the night. The siren is connected to the County 911 system. That means, for example, that an automated alarm responding to smoke in a residential kitchen in Allegheny Township will set it off, even if the Hollidaysburg PVFD doesn’t respond to the call.
- The siren serves no functional purpose in summoning firefighters or warning residents of danger.
After several constituent complaints, Borough Council briefly re-visited the siren issue in 2018. It heard that Zeek’s promise that the siren would sound only for fire calls in the Borough wasn’t true, that local residents were suffering from the noise, and that the siren served no real civic purpose. Borough Solicitor Nathan Karn advised Council that it had no right to pass an ordinance against the siren, now that it had been installed. No one on Borough Council was able to repeat or explain this advice, apparently delivered during executive session, but it declined to act against the siren.
The Watchdog now receives more complaints about the siren than any other single issue. The siren is extremely loud, significantly lowering the quality of life for people living within a half-mile radius of the fire house. One area complainant is an emergency room nurse who spends most of her waking hours at the hospital. She notes that her sleep is frequently interrupted by the “pointless” sounding of the siren. Real estate agents say the siren has had a negative affect on property values in the area.
Request Submitted
In April 2022, the Watchdog sent a Right-to-Know request to Blair County to obtain records of Call-for-Service (CFS) reports generated for siren soundings. While the County did not deny our request outright, they did attempt to charge the Watchdog $1,773 to print out 8,415 pages, as they claimed they lacked the necessary software to redact the records without printing them out and redacting them manually with a sharpie. (The redactions were required to protect phone numbers and other personal data from public distribution).
After contacting the vendor that sold the County the alert processing system, the Watchdog knew that the County’s claim that the records could not be reproduced digitally wasn’t true. We appealed to the Office of Open Records. The Watchdog lost that appeal on the sole basis of an affidavit from the County reiterating its claims, under penalty of perjury, that it lacked the means to reproduce the CFS records digitally.
The Watchdog then appealed to the Blair County Court of Common Pleas. Before trial, the County settled the case by sending the Watchdog searchable PDFs of the records.
As expected, the CFS records show that the majority of siren soundings were in response to calls outside the Borough of Hollidaysburg. The number of CFS calls on record were fewer than the siren soundings counted by citizens in the month of February 2022.
Conclusion
- The County sought to obstruct public access to the unpublished CFS records by attempting to charge $1773 for them — far beyond the means of most citizen requesters. Only because the Watchdog had the resourced to litigate were the records finally released. We give the County a nominally passing compliance grade of “C-” only because it ultimately decided to install the software necessary to export the public records, rather than fight us in court.
- The siren is a public nuisance, providing no benefit at all to emergency services while decreasing the quality of life and property values for residents unfortunate enough to live near the fire station.
