Waiting for the siren call? In small-town Alberta, the daily wail arrives like clockwork

Residents of some Alberta communities are familiar with a rather noisy notice that it's noon.

The ear-splitting wails are the sounds of sirens that were installed decades ago. 

Some are civil defence sirens — also known as air raid sirens — that were set up early on during the Cold War. Other sirens were put in by fire departments as a way to summon crews to an emergency. 

"As annoying as it is, it's a part of everyday life, especially in small towns," said Sarah McEwan, who works in a store underneath the siren in Thorsby, Alta.

Thorsby, a town of fewer than 1,000 people located about 70 kilometres southwest of Edmonton, has a civil defence siren, one of more than 120 installed in Alberta communities to warn citizens in the event of a nuclear attack. There were about 1,700 such sirens in Canada by the mid-1960s, according to the Canadian Civil Defence Museum website. 

WATCH | Why the sirens are there and why they blare: 

The federal government was behind the push to install the warning systems in communities, said Eric Strikwerda, associate professor of history at Athabasca University. 

"It started out as a program meant to put air raid sirens in cities of 50,000 people or more," he said. "Later on, they started to install them in smaller centres."

Sirens also became a practical solution for local fire departments. 

In the central Alberta town of Bowden, about 45 kilometres south of Red Deer, a school bell was used to alert firefighters when the town first started exploring the idea of acquiring a siren in 1943. 

Bowden purchased its siren on July 14, 1952. More than 70 years later, its sound still fills the town every day at noon.

In Wabamun, Alta., a hamlet about 70 kilometres west of Edmonton, its siren was installed in its current location in 1965 — one year after the establishment of a fire department that would provide protection to the whole municipal district. 

To get firefighters to an incident, residents would call an advertised number that rang at three different phones. When one of the phones was answered, the details of the emergency were written down and the operator would push a button on the side of the phone. 

That would trigger the siren to go off 10 times.