Silent and Rusting, Sirens Remain as Relic of Red Scare

They dot Los Angeles like aging sentries, symbols of a threat that no longer exists.

One siren is shaped like a rounded birdhouse atop a telephone pole on 3rd Street in Hancock Park, its mustard-yellow paint stained black with soot. Another, near the All-American Burger restaurant on Westwood Boulevard, looks like a wide-brimmed hat as it peeks out from an overgrown tree.

“You never hear it, so you forget it’s even there,” said Brian Ouzounian, 43, whose parents own the burger stand. “Kind of like an old girlfriend.”

When Ouzounian was a toddler, in the days of the Red Scare and back-yard bomb shelters, 220 air raid sirens were installed across the city as part of the nation’s civil defense effort. Rendered obsolete by advanced communication systems and the demise of the Evil Empire, the sirens have become the Cold War’s version of the Hula-Hoop and Cadillac fins.

Because there is no procedure for keeping track of sirens removed from demolished buildings, no one at City Hall is sure how many of the devices are left. And because the only municipal employee who had a map retired several years ago, no one is sure where to find the sirens, even if they wanted to.

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At 10 a.m. on the last Friday of every month, they used to come alive.

It began with a groan that might have been mistaken for an approaching truck. A moment later, the groan became a piercing wail, like a police car in pursuit, or an ambulance nearing a rescue. Within a few seconds, it descended to a groan again, only to start up one more time.

A generation of baby boomers can still recall schoolteachers turning out the ceiling lights, slamming shut the blinds and hollering for the class to dive under the desks.

“It got the adrenaline going,” said the middle-aged manager of a Larchmont Village bank, which stands next to one of the defunct sirens. “Every time they went off, your heart would start beating.”

In time, however, the Emergency Broadcast System made such outdoor warning devices antiquated. Later, with the sophistication of modern nuclear missiles, it became clear that there would be little time to warn of an impending attack. By 1985, when Don Keith joined the city’s General Services Department, the sirens had fallen into disrepair.

“If an air raid siren went off,” said Keith, director of the department’s communications division, “people would wonder what to do.”

Shortly after his arrival, the city launched a review of the sirens in an effort to determine their effectiveness and gauge how much maintenance was needed. Officials discovered that 60% of the devices were not functioning. Their metal parts were rusted and their underground cables had rotted.

In 1988, the City Council’s Police, Fire and Public Safety Committee recommended that the plug be pulled on all the sirens to avoid an accidental sounding. Removing the units would cost more than $250,000, according to an interdepartmental memo, so officials decided it was “in the best interest of the city” to just let them be.

“At some future date, should the city need some type of warning system, it would be a simple matter to reactivate the existing sirens,” the memo concluded.

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The maintenance workers who once kept the sirens in working order have retired. Their positions have been eliminated.

The city’s emergency management director, Shirley Mattingly, spends more time answering questions from the curious than bracing for the kind of attack for which the sirens were intended.

“Sometimes, a citizen will call and ask, ‘What’s this siren doing out in front of my building?’ ” said Mattingly, who has no recollection of the Friday morning drills. “Other people call and simply ask what the siren is meant for. I have to explain to them that originally it was for nuclear attack.”

For a younger generation, such concepts are ancient history. To Danielle Alvarez, 25, a talent agent from Los Angeles, the air raid sirens are the stuff of a grainy, black-and-white past. “I associate them with TV,” she said, “like what you see in Europe in an old World War II movie.”

Even Keith, perhaps the city’s most knowledgeable source about the sirens, has begun to view them as a distant echo. Pressed for a list of their whereabouts, he paused, unable to recall where any are located. Then he remembered one--a siren at Temple and Spring streets, just a stone’s throw from City Hall.

Despite the consideration given to someday reactivating the sirens, he figures their days are long gone.