Hacker News Reader

AFAICS sirens aren't intended to warn the populace so much as calling firemen to make it to the fire trucks ASAP. But that's only for voluntary fire brigades in villages rather than professional brigades ready to jump onto trucks immediately, with fireman's poles and such.

View on HN

Berlin for example has a large number of voluntary fire brigades in addition to the professional fire brigades. They’re alerted in cases where manpower from the professional brigade is insufficient and/or tied up in other incidents.

However, even voluntarily fire brigades usually use beepers instead of sirens nowadays.

My guess is, though, that these are located in former villages that became part of the city 80-100 years ago, like in Hamburg.

No, it’s actually all throughout the city, pretty much every district has at least one, many have multiple bases: https://www.berliner-feuerwehr.de/ueber-uns/freiwillige-feue...

Until the 90s the sirens in west Germany were also used for civil defense purposes. After the Cold War the system was dismantled on federal level and only some cities have it now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com