QUESTION MARK

Dear Mark:

What are those things I see on telephone poles all over town that look like speakers? Cellular phone receivers? Can you set me straight?

--Can’t Make Heads or Tails of It

Dear Can’t:

Be happy to. They are old air raid sirens. And how fitting that in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union you should gaze wonderingly at these charming Cold War relics. Back in ‘54, when the “duck and cover” was the hot dance, the federal government was offering matching funds to any municipality for the purchase and maintenance of these sirens (plus air raid shelters, Geiger counters and all the Spam you could eat). The cities and unincorporated areas of L.A. County helped themselves to more than 500, which were tested at 10 a.m. on the final Friday of every month.

Although the Cuban missile crisis gave the whole civil defense program a shot in the arm, by the early ‘80s, federal funds were drying up for California and the sirens fell into disrepair. Many didn’t work at all; others went off spontaneously, flooding police, fire and news outlets with panicky phone calls. The sirens, which could not be operated individually (it was an all-or-nothing shriek-fest), were of little use--and nobody had any idea what to do when they heard them.

Finally, in 1986, the L.A. City Council voted to deactivate the sirens (unincorporated L.A. County and many other municipalities pulled the plug around the same time, too), shifting the burden of disaster-warning to the more recognizable tones of the Emergency Broadcast System. The Federal Emergency Management Administration insists that the siren program is still active, but there’s nothing in the national budget for it. With no federal funds available to remove the sirens (a $250,000 job in Los Angeles alone), they’re just left to decay.