The 3:30 AM Alarm

I was awaken this morning in my German village by the local city fire siren.  Like most village with a decent population, we have a local volunteer fire department, with a couple of trucks.  What typically happens is the siren in the village will go off with a 25-second warble sound.  It's a particular warble and you know precisely what it is.  On average, I'd say in a typical year....there's around twenty-five occasions when it goes off.  To be honest, in the mid-day...Monday through Friday....they might be lucky to get eight guys who are either farmers or work in the village who can tend to one single truck and make an appearance.

This alarm this morning at 3:30?  Well....it went to a two-second strong pitch....then went way down quickly to a 35-percent pitch (slow-motion would be the best description) and then faded by the 8th second.  Then a minute later, it repeated.  A minute later, it repeated again.  On and on, for maybe forty-odd minutes, this weird alarm kept going.

The village emergency crew will tell you that there are only two pitches or tones for the system....one is a continuous 'blast' which means full-up emergency (massive storm or impending doom), or this firemen's alert.  But this weak warble tone didn't fit either episode. 

Around the 5th warble, my German wife made the comment that this might mean a chemical disaster, or some massive airplane crash.  I tried to disregard it and go back to sleep (that's the Alabama stoic type guy that I am).  It took me maybe ten minutes but I did fall back to sleep. 

This morning, the emergency folks explained to the news folks in Wiesbaden.....that....well...the back-up power battery had started to fail or short-out, and this was the only way to get to the attention of the maintenance folks.  They did come to admit that there were dozens and dozens of calls.....from the residents of the town....asking if this was a special alarm that they need to react upon.

I would take a guess that well over half the town was fully awake by 4 AM, sipping coffee and wondering if they should take some action, but they just didn't know what kind of action. To add to the whole episode, there's two adjacent villages within a mile, and those folks could also hear the warble and also reflected upon this being a special but unknown type disaster as well. 

Just my observation but it kinda shows the difference here.  Germans were fixated upon the odd warble and how it didn't fit any of their diagrams or actions of 'trouble.  They wanted to know the shape and size of the emergency.  Me the American, once I tuned into it not being warble 'A' or 'B'....I more or less turned over and went back to sleep.