On Halloweeners, T.S Eliot and the importance of sirens

Plenty of us looked into the eyes of young and innocent children - many of them cleverly costumed - when they came trick-or-treating on Halloween. They’re a reminder of how important it is to try to do the right thing so they can have a decent future. It’s not easy, but we have to keep on learning.

One trick-or-treater came dressed as a plague doctor, another as a swamp monster. Thinking about the plague doctor, I thought the swamp monster  - until I was corrected - might have been a representation of a sinister virus. That put me in mind of the closing lines of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Hollow Men”: “This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”

The good news is that there are lots and lots of highly motivated and educated people out there seeing the world’s problems and working toward solutions. Humans are adaptable and resilient. And nature keeps trying to be as beautiful as she can be despite our best efforts at thwarting her.

The siren discussion

In all the siren discussion in Lewes, I may have missed one argument in favor of sirens that I have always found to be rock solid. That is, the sounding of the siren alerts people in the area that not only is there an emergency needing attention, but there will be volunteers responding and we need to get out of their way so they can get to their firehouses quickly for as effective a response as possible.

Sirens put us all on alert, not just the volunteers.

I was impressed to read the many efforts to minimize alarm soundings in the middle of Lewes that are the center of current attention. Over the past 40 years, I know of at least two instances when sirens have been moved to try to accommodate the concerns of neighbors.

In this most recent instance, one neighbor suggested that maybe reducing the decibels by 10 or 20 might be helpful. A constructive comment.

I also found it enlightening to read that the sirens are only sounded for the most urgent emergencies - a small percentage of the hundreds of alarms to which volunteers and paid professionals respond each month.

The dialogue is refreshing. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “In the search lies the solution.”

Noises constantly changing

Lewes used to be a town of many different noises. Lighthouse horns in foggy weather, the 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. Board of Public Works whistles, the one cycle of the firehouse siren on weekdays at noon and 1 p.m., the diesel rumble of menhaden and headboat vessels, and their horns sounding departing blasts.

The town still has many distinctive noises, but most of them are the sirens of fire trucks coming in and out of town, and even more than that, the many ambulances coming into Beebe Healthcare emergency room from all over eastern Sussex County.

Beebe Healthcare’s recent expansion plans will change that significantly. When emergency facilities are opened - as planned in the next few years - in the Millville/Ocean View area and in Georgetown, many of the ambulance runs coming to Beebe’s Lewes campus will go to those new facilities.

The sirens remain an important element of our communal living: a constant reminder that there are people in need at all hours of the day, and a reminder that many volunteers are out there attending to those needs, for the benefit of all of us.