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City works out kinks in siren

HEIDI DESCH | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 8 years, 6 months AGO
by HEIDI DESCH
Heidi Desch is features editor and covers Flathead County for the Daily Inter Lake. She previously served as managing editor of the Whitefish Pilot, spending 10 years at the newspaper and earning honors as best weekly newspaper in Montana. She was a reporter for the Hungry Horse News and has served as interim editor for The Western News and Bigfork Eagle. She is a graduate of the University of Montana. She can be reached at [email protected] or 406-758-4421. | May 26, 2017 4:22 PM

The city’s historic curfew siren returned to Whitefish Tuesday, and by week’s end a few bugs in the system seemed to have been fixed.

The traditional 10 p.m. siren had been quiet since September 2015 with the demolition of the old City Hall and subsequent construction of a new building. The new City Hall opened Monday, May 22 and the next evening the siren returned.

However, residents may have been alarmed when the first blast Tuesday night lasted longer than normal — roughly for a full minute.

City Manager Adam Hammatt said there was a system issue in the control panel that wasn’t allowing the length of the siren to be shortened.

Electrician Mark Heider worked on the issue to “set the blast length to about what it was in the past.”

Hammatt sent out an advisory on Wednesday addressing the issue.

“We are trying to work the bugs out of the new system,” he said. “Please bear with us.”

By Friday the issue seemed to be resolved, though a few folks in town note that the siren had been shortened too much.

Hammatt said two longtime Whitefish residents listened to the new time setting and felt like it was set correctly. He said if anyone knows an exact length of time it should be, the city welcomes input.

“The nice thing is we can adjust it for a couple seconds longer,” he said. “We’re happy to adjust it.”

Use of the siren dates back to 1919, when it wailed at 9 p.m. A new ordinance approved in October 1944 moved the time to 10 p.m.

The siren went off at all times of the day when it was used to alert volunteer fire fighters. Today, Whitefish has a mostly paid, full-time ambulance and fire department.

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