Noon "whistle?"

This is about as off topic as you can get...

I grew up in a small river town just outside of MSP (current population of 15001) and every day at noon the local fire department blows their air horn for one cycle at noon to signal lunch I imagine (old logging town), is this a thing, do other places do this?

I know a lot of people and have never heard of such a thing, is my town that odd?

Everywhere I have ever lived has always done this. Granted, I live in some small places

Never seen the firedepartment do it, but any town with a factory-type workplace that I've been to does it.

Yep there is one Small ass town in WA that I know does it.

Best way to make sure the horn works when you need it is to test it every day. Can't say that any fire departments around here do this, but I do live just down the road from a concrete plant. They apparently use an old Caddy horn to indicate shift changes or something, I hear it several times a day when I am in my yard. I envision an actual Cadillac parked out back with the boss walking out and blowing the horn for 2 seconds. /random

I imagine it started as a daily test of the alarm for the fire fighters, and turned into a local tradition that people have hung on to over the years. If it was always done at noon, the locals probably started using it as the lunch whistle, and that makes it more likely to continue as a tradition.

In the Coast Guard, we tested the ship's alarms everyday. It was usually at noon as well. But our lunch was an hour later at 1300.

The closest we have here is the tornado sirens sounding every Wednesday at noon. There might be some places in town that make sounds every day at noon but I don't know about them! This is not a small town, so I wouldn't hear it if it wasn't close to where I live or work.

The 12 o'clock whistle was common growing up on Long Island but I don't recall hearing it the last few times I was down there.

The local fire company tests the giant horn once daily around here. It never ceases to scare the berkeley out of me when I'm sitting at the stoplight in front of the building. It's louder and deeper than any train. It vibrates my insides like I imagine a poorly aimed Shock Wave Lithotripsy for kidney stones would.

I grew up in a small town in SE Minnesota, they still blow the noon whistle every day.

Huckleberry wrote: The local fire company tests the giant horn once daily around here. It never ceases to scare the berkeley out of me when I'm sitting at the stoplight in front of the building. It's louder and deeper than any train. It vibrates my insides like I imagine a poorly aimed Shock Wave Lithotripsy for kidney stones would.

Exactly that deep rumble as it spins up. berkeleying loud.

I live in the suburbs of 2 the second largest city in Michigan. I still here one here. Grew up in BFE and always had one as well.

Sweet!
I am not one much for tradition... but it's cool that this lives on!
Great info guys and gals!

It has nothing to do with local workforce or business, it's about weather warning alert system. They test the weather warning siren near work on Wednesdays at noon and the one near our house on Saturdays at noon. You'll be happy that it works because we had one that didn't go off locally when it was needed. Our small town hall is the fire department.

When I was growing up, there was an industry in town, I believe it was a saw mill, that would sound the 12:00 whistle. It was so loud, we could here it across town.

Our county tests there warning system first Saturday of every month at 1:00. It is LOUD if you are anywhere near it and it turns in your direction.

1 horn for noon-time, 3 horns for an actual emergency call. 1 horn and I knew it was time to get back to my grandma's for lunch... and 3 horns and my grandma would run to the old school police scanner to get the first hint of gossip for the neighborhood block, haha.

RIP memere. It's funny what sensory items you associate with other things/people/places. I work <2 miles from my grandparents' house, and every damn day when I hear the horn, I think of my grandmother. I miss her...

A quarry near where I grew up blasted at noon each day. We called it the twelve o'clock boom and it could be felt for a few miles away.

Noon here, every day. Ours is a siren. They use it to summon the volunteers when there is a fire.

No whistle. However, the block I grew up on had two churches on it. One had a faux-bell tower that would chime on the hour and play a brief song at noon.

They did it in the small town where I grew up in central Georgia too. The big town I live in now (150k ppl, still central GA) tests their EMS system on Saturdays. It's a connected set of towers that actually play voice messages too. THey use a slower-than normal speech pattern to increase clarity over echoes and such. I live in hearing range of a couple towers, so on clear, serene Saturdays I get this weird siren and then the disembodied voice of god talking about emergencies with a couple slightly off-timed echoes. It always seems like a great scene at the beginning of an apocalypse movie.

Every day at sea onboard a ship, the whistle blows at noon.

Yeah, there are a whole bunch of small towns around here in the SEPA/DE/NEMD area that still do that.

News Alert: Fire / Storm strikes at exactly noon, entire town destroyed!

I remember the "Russians missiles are coming" alarm tests. I don't remember, but they may have been at noon.

Never heard of it. When I worked midnights I'd have blown the thing up.

aircooled wrote: I remember the "Russians missiles are coming" alarm tests. I don't remember, but they may have been at noon.

Back during the Cold War, there were B52s that may or may not have had nuclear weapons aboard stationed at the air base (Griffis Air Force Base in Rome, NY) and so there was always a lot of concern that the Russians would hit the city fairly early on if they had ever tried any funny business, hence there are bomb shelters everywhere in the city and tons of air raid sirens. My father talks about how one night he got woke up by one of the air raid sirens going off and everyone in the neighborhood panicking. Turns out that lightning hit one of the sirens and set it off.