Many of Boston's fire boxes are over a century old and are still operating smoothly Subscribe to WCVB on RU-vid now for more: bit.ly/1e8lAMZ Get more Boston news: www.wcvb.com Like us: / wcvb5 Follow us: / wcvb Instagram: / wcvb5
On June 18th, 2024, there was a 2-hour outage state-wide of the 911 system. Boston officials instructed the public to use the red fire boxes to indicate emergency (along with a list of police phone numbers). That day was a rare, modern-day example of how an old but reliable technology can save the day when modern tech fails.
Hardly. 911 systems and general phone line systems are neolithic at this point. Calling it modern is very inaccurate. A shocker that when 1 system goes down, another system is still up.... duh? This is like saying "An airplane flight was canceled, thankfully horse carriages are still operational. Goes to show modern transport is unreliable and old fashion is way better!"
@@Sammysapphira cell towers are not that old, at most some date to the 90's if that far back. landlines may date to the 60's in the most aged systems. they keep the cell towers rather up to date
@@Sammysapphira You missed the point completely. It wasn't the phone systems that went down that day, it was an issue with the firewall in the main call centers that malfunctioned and caused 911 to be inaccessible. I would consider a digital computer based phone system to be pretty modern. Also no need to be so negative here. The original commenter is correct, it was very nice to have a backup option to contact emergency services that day.
San Francisco maintains their fire and police call boxes for the same reason: they’re reliable, don’t require power, and provide an extra layer of protection during an earthquake.
No. Switches and mechanical ingredients are way too expensive. This would be a cheap mass produced board with crappy software on it emulating all this with a need to be connected to a cloud service which is provisioned by bloated Terraform, Jenkins and the other stuff around to deploy the server collecting fire alarms which could have been coded in 50 lines. And then they would put "AI" in it via another cloud service to check whether there is real a fire based on some toddler-based "AI" models. Ah yes, the whole system would cost 100,000 a month to pay to the cloud provider and all the 3rd party parasi äh "cloud improvement services". On top, each instance would take 5 minutes to start because they need to import a super bloated monitoring library and initialize storage systems via another service. So if your instances crash after 4 minutes due to a programming error or missing resources you can watch it live dying slowly. It then goes out to the news as "emergency system breakdown ...."
good remark with billions spent on radio communications the systems fail sometimes from day 1. Pennsylvania very expensive state wide system cost way more that est, had to take yrs longer. yo finish and failed immediately. and after many attempts to get working had to be totally be replaced with a older but proven system
It is nice to see something simple, effective, and reliable. I hope the repair man has an apprentice in training. Coming from someone who repairs old machines daily, full time training, seeing multiple types of failures from common to not, and learning how to remedy them is how you truly understand something. At least in my industry, it's rare that enthusiasts can keep up with full time pace despite what they claim themselves being capable of.
"simple, effective, and reliable" Exactly. It's refreshing to see something useful that doesn't have unnecessary components (i.e. wifi, bluetooth, touch screen, etc.) shoved into it.
Just to point out. Several recent Cellular outages have happened and a call box system that is completely separate from that is (what's called in the biz) a disaster recovery fail safe.
Reminds me of when I almost enacted a worst case scenario plan but stopped because the manager (who we had strong evidence of having been held hostage with power and comms cut out by bad actors) also did his part in following the plan ... Which involved driving to the nearest cell towers, previously mapped, and brief us on the actual situation and de-escalate any escalation we might have done (establish radio comms and move staff and assets instead of sending in cops and armed security) Part of the plan involved always having a standby POTS phone line as last ditch effort fallback and that failure made us assume intentional tampering instead of sudden weather cutting power lines and other freak coincidences.
I certainly hope they have the brains to hire mr colluccis replacement BEFORE he retires, so that the trainee can be properly instructed in this important craft!
Call boxes work without the need of cellular service or power. Removing them while still being fully functional because they are old is beyond stupid. I hope Boston continues to operate them well into the future
@@BritishEngineer yes it is beyond stupid, call boxes use no electricity besides needing the bare minimum to power the telegraph pulse. The maintenance is very minimum less intensive than any modern fiber systems or cellular systems, if it was maintenance heavy they wouldn’t exist, and it’s hardline communication, it won’t break down like a WiFi or cellular system can. San Francisco uses call boxes still and they’ve survived many earthquakes
@@AppalachianMountaineer1863 San Francisco ran out of "Out of Order" signs for their alarm boxes a few years ago and had to wrap broken ones in a red towel for a while because so many of them stopped working. They are robust, yes, but the system is nearly 160 years old and that age is showing; the city spent about $1.2M keeping it going in 2018 alone.
I have visited the BFD Annunciator building in the Fenway. It is as old and still operable and in every day use. All of the call boxes are handled there. The equipment is all original. It's a working museum, actually.
There’s one of these (looks EXACTLY the same but plastic) that was in my grandpas basement and I always thought it was hooked up, he passed away on Memorial Day and while cleaning out the house I found out inside is a phone and it was hooked up, the phone had a dial tone!
(1.) Besides “If it’s not broken don’t fix it” (in this case the fire boxes), they are now unique (among U.S. cities) to Boston. (2.) It would be cool if there is an app showing location of the fire boxes
I have a number of Gamewell boxes as well as some from NY City which had custom-made boxes and pedestals made for them. The most beautiful box is the "VF" pedestal from the 1920s, I have one from Brooklyn dated on it's base 1929, the guy in charge back the Victor Fine overhauled the system and these massive pedestals were placed all over the city, they stand 7 feet high and weigh 900 pounds! I have a video of it on youtube, just add this to the base url; watch?v=4ZD6HV-oU5
Due to phone stupidity most people have no clue where they are at...do realize that if you broke down or suffer a medical emergency they could not find without the box
Not mentioned is that these fire boxes were developed and made by the Gamewell company in my home town the Boston suburb of Newton. It is now a division of Honeywell and is no longer in Newton
You should have included the morse keyer in case the first arriving need more or more specialized help. They would be able to communicate using morse code. I dont believe the cams are using morse though, but numbers, 9 clicks for 9, 2 for 2 as opposed to ----. & ..--- Easier to hear and make out especially if you dont know morse.
I wonder if any places still use the kind of fire alarm seen in a widely circulated old image where when you pull it, part of the alarm locks around your wrist until unlocked by the authorities (the idea supposedly being a way to identify who actually pulled the alarm in the event of a prank alarm pull)
I'm pissed they removed them from my town. I was so ready to pull it if theres any fires on my walk, I don't think I will make the call now they removed it to spread the message. these are important to have around
Interesting. I wish we still had these where I live, though we have a couple of speaker boxes that can be used to hail a taxi. Well, supposedly, as I am not too sure if they are still used.
my neighborhood in Phila had theses used it 1 time for trash fire there's had voice communication . not sure if they still have them i escaped in 1996. as for the workshop a few buck for scheduled tour would help pay to keep it up
This is why even it this modern age of technology with computers and cellphones the old technology is not totally obsolete. Every technology is eventually replaced by something new and better but sometimes a technological marvel from long ago is just as important today as it was in then and as long as you teach the basics of maintaining them and company’s still supply parts or you fabricate them yourself the technology your great great grandparents used now be used by you and then the next generation.
We used to have these several years ago but the city did away with them pretty quickly because the hoodlums were destroying them or setting them off for no reason. Costing the city tons of money a year.
"Technology...if you can call it that" Such an ignorant line. Just because it's doesn't rely on Google/Apple or connecting to the internet doesn't mean it's useless.
What happens when the repair guy dies? We have a competency crisis that's only getting worse because Boomers refuse to retire or pass on the knowledge, so when they do move on, no one else knows how to do their jobs well enough.
Its kinda cool that these things still exist but do they serve any purpose aside from being street furniture? When was the last time someone pulled a real alarm? How many people are aware that this is still a functional system? I would guess that 99.9999% of the population would reach for their cell phone in the case of an emergency and if the 911 system was down would have no idea that there is an alternative.
That's what happens when a fire department operates a railway! Or should I instead be outraged at something else? You comment was unclear. Fun side note, you can swap the first two letters of unclear and go nuclear.
They must get a lot more false alarms from these alarm boxes than a poorly set up building alarm system. Most modern cities have retired these in the 1960s
meh. rip them out. outdated. obsolete. replace them with some fancy modern digital ecofriendly power saving device. far better. can have a few politicians show up and have their photo taken as they grin inanely. give themselves a payrise and bonus besides for implementing such revolutionary technology. next day, everything turns to crap. surprised pikachu face. thats how we run things here in the land down under. no outdated old technology for us! nope, we got the fibre optics and the way of the future! lol... i think they expect us to perform smoke signals in an emergency. digitally...
These boxes are the most advanced you can get, without going digital, the problem with digital is that its unreliable, would you rather have a digital signal that bounces between 20+ towers and can be never received because someone fucked the code, or a direct telegram to fire dispatch that calls emergency services directly
Back then things were built to last as long as possible while being made in America. Now a days everything is built to be as cheap as possible so you’re forced to buy a whole new object instead of simply fixing the existing one. Planned obsolescence
