In 1978, this happened: an air raid siren on the Hartford Courant’s Broad Street building malfunctioned, and could not be shut off via radio signal from Hartford Fire Department headquarters on Pearl Street, as it had been designed to do when installed less than a year before.
Instead of doing the sensible thing — switching it off, manually — the HFD decided to activate all eighteen other air raid sirens, at midnight. Their plan was to immediately shut them off.
Text alerts were not a thing in 1978. Siren tests would be announced in advance in the newspaper, but this was not a test. You can imagine how thrilled residents were to be surprised by every air raid siren in the city going off at once in the middle of the night.
This also did not fix the problem.
It, in fact, worsened the situation. The Courant’s siren did not shut off, and now, there was a second siren — located at the fire station on Sigourney and Niles streets in Asylum Hill — that was blaring and unable to be turned off by radio signal.
Two hours later, the ruckus ended when both troublesome sirens were turned off with a key. Reports say that the plan was to keep those sirens off until the problem could be fixed.
About two years later, another siren mysteriously got set off, this time in downtown, with the deputy fire chief musing that “sunspots” might have caused the problem. Three sirens were accidentally sounded for fifteen minutes one morning in 1984. These later false alarms at least had the decency to occur in the morning 8 o’clock hour when most people are up and awake.
