WPS 2810 With Some History

[DJ2226]

Just a bit of history, Columbus, GA had a system of 12 sirens in the 60's, supposedly 5 Thunderbolt and 7 SD-10s in this handy book of records on page 28 at the bottom of the page. I speculate that the Thunderbolts were located at 5 of the fire stations (I'll get some locations later unless I forget) and SD-10s at the schools. That number grew to 27 as indicated in a 81' siren study, probably because of the tornado outbreak in the 70's. At this point the other Thunderbolts ended up going to parks and schools. Well back in the 1920's Columbus's Metro Airport was located off of US-280 where the now defunct Dolly Madison and RC Cola buildings and Carl Gregory dealership is. It stayed till the extreme late 60's or early 70's and was relocated to it's current address on 3250 W Britt David Rd. This website has a picture of the old field and more details. When McCord came around in 2002-2003 they installed two of the new WPS-2810 heads on existing Thunderbolt poles. I would guess they wanted to keep the one downtown high up above the rooftops, but with this one the only reason I would see it being reused would be because the pole is metal. What is even more interesting is that it seems the rest of the Thunderbolts were installed on concrete poles, which were later removed from their locations with most of sirens except one at the fire station on Commerce St; one of the poles is in a scrap pile. They were lower down to the ground, so I guess that's why they tossed them instead of putting the Whelens on top of them. Anyway this siren was relatively close to the airport, so I'm guessing the arm sticking out the side was for an obstruction lamp. They may have removed the light when the airport was relocated. This was also one of the more successful tests of the system since they seemed to get all of the DTMF tones till the post test message; yes, air horn is alive again but for how long is the question.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id0Iu0eNDdQ