Bit of a rant about my city’s system: Our sirens are tested weekly on Mondays, since we live around a lot of chemical and petro plants that can release some nasty stuff if something goes wrong. Haven’t had any serious warnings since I moved here years ago, but the sirens themselves can’t exactly be relied on either.

Problem is, our system consists of “High Power Speaker Station” (HPSS-32) sirens made by a company called ATI Systems. Holy fuck these sirens are garbage. Speakers manufactured in China that leak rainwater inside and short out the drivers, controllers that completely lack redundancy if one or both of the amplifiers fail, which renders it only half as loud or entirely silent. ATI refuses to support older hardware and forces the city to buy new controllers when the old ones die within a decade, causing the maintenance costs to outweigh having just gone with a less scummy manufacturer.

ATI itself is a horrible company that basically suckers cities into buying their junk by undercutting legitimate manufacturers, then leaves cities hanging when their sirens start rapidly failing. San Francisco recently had to remove their entire system of HPSS16 and HPSS32 units because the system kept failing and had a ton of security vulnerabilities. The system didn’t even last two decades, yet the Cold War era STL-10 mechanical sirens they replaced had served the city without issue for half a century.

So yeah, I don’t exactly feel safe with our current system. If your city has ATI sirens, don’t count on them in an emergency and get a weather radio instead.