Stonington- At least three times a week, Mike Berk is awoken by the whistle of the Pawcatuck Fire Station.
"It's like Chinese water torture," said Berk, who describes the fire whistle as a "sonorous belch" loud enough to put a hold on phone calls. Berk can see the fire station from his back window, an initial selling point when he purchased the home.
"I'm still happy about the proximity; it's just the noise," said Berk, a nurse at Westerly Hospital. "In this age of cellular phones and paging technology, do we have to listen to that?"
Fire departments around the country are facing community complaints about the noise associated with an external fire alarm. While fire stations staffed full time do not sound an external alarm, volunteer fire departments do.
Insurance requires that a fire department have two methods of notifying firefighters of an emergency. A pager is the first method. Full-time staffed fire departments have a person in the station at all times, which counts as another, while volunteer fire departments do not have a person in the station 24 hours a day and are thereby required to sound an external alarm.
"We rely on the whistle as a second means of notifying the firemen of an accident," assistant fire chief Kevin Burns explained, noting that pagers can be affected by distance, location and weather.
Of the Pawcatuck Fire Station's 40 firefighters, 34 live within earshot of the whistle.
Burns recalled an incident last week when he left the firehouse, forgot his pager in the office, and was only notified of a 911 call because he heard the "sonorous belch" of the Pawcatuck whistle.
"Nighttime is one of the more crucial times -- if there was radio failure, how would anybody know?" Burns said. "The deadliest fires are during the sleeping hours when people are less likely to wake up and get out.
"This is our method for providing our expertise to the community," Burns said. "If someone wants to staff the station full time around the clock, we'll look at a different avenue."
"We've had similar concerns from people here," said Joe Winski, assistant chief at East Great Plains fire station in Norwich. "But we try and work with our community and make it work. The bottom line is that when you hear that siren blowing someone is in trouble."
East Great Plains stopped sounding their external horn for medical calls after midnight. Other fire stations have taken similar methods to reduce the number of times a fire horn is set off.
While Berk has lived behind the Pawcatuck Fire Station since 2001, Frances LoPresto has lived within feet of the fire station for over 50 years. Her family, in fact, sold the fire station building to the town for $3,000.
Now 90 years old, LoPresto says she has never lost a night of sleep from the fire whistle.
LoPresto remains fast asleep with the whistle only 20 feet away. Berk is regularly awoken with the whistle a block away. And firefighters, scattered throughout downtown Pawcatuck, might fall into either category.
"I admire what they do, especially their valor," Berk said. "They put themselves in harm's way on a voluntary basis and I respect that a lot. It's not their work, it's the horn.
"I don't want these guys to get pissed at me. I respect them. I just want to sleep."
© The Day Publishing Co., 2005
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