A little piece of our history was remembered on 11-10-11 when through the help of our local Southern Maryland Electric Co-Op we installed the old siren that since 1970 had been used to summon our members to calls on the grounds of station 9. When the older members of the department realized the need for a substation in the California area the first thing we thought about was installing a siren in the area so that the people would start asking questions and hopefully get an application to join. Well it worked and we had many citizens who applied at the Lexington Park station and remained members until the station in California was finally built in 1993. From that time on until just recently when the county installed new sirens at all the fire stations this was at one time the sole means of letting the volunteers know there was a call.

Now to the present day with all the new inventions our department was one of the first in the county to get pagers for their members to alert them of calls. This proved to be a very good way of notification and as time went on the leadership of the department mainly the fire chief, felt that blowing the sirens for every call that we were running was not only annoying to the citizens who had to listen to it blow at 3:00 in the morning but not necessary in alerting the firefighters. Now I know some firefighters really enjoyed the sound of the house siren blowing while they went responding out the door to a call and I must say myself it does sound cool but for the mother out there that has a baby or child woken up in the middle of the night when it blew and she had to quiet them down and get them back to sleep it was truly a blessing when we stopped.

Now the cost of pagers is not cheap by any means with the price being around $400.00 for each charger and pager. As far as what it has done for our response by the members there is no question but it has improved our turnout considerably. We try to budget these items every year in order to keep up with our growing membership and after a new member has finished his or her probation they are assigned one and if they decide that the job is not what they expected then they are required to turn it back in so that we may issue to the next person in line for one.

So if you are sitting in a restaurant or store and you hear somewhere in the crowd a "Beep-Beep-Beep" you will know that a firefighter or rescue squad person is being summoned to an emergency call. It's much quieter than the siren and it won't wake you up in the middle of the night.

So we just couldn't bring ourselves to throw the old siren in the recycle bin at the county dump so we sanded all the old rust off of it after thirty some years and gave it a new paint job and now it proudly stands silently out front of station 9. I promise you it won't blow anymore but when you look up at it next to the American flag it sure does help to bring back a lot of memories and no one can take those away from us now can they. Again thanks to Jay Bowles from Southern Maryland Electric Co-Op and his crews who took their lunch time to come by and give us a hand.