Siren Song ?

Hearing a siren when I am driving always sends me into high alert and looking to see if there is any fire or police vehicle approaching that I need to get out of the way for. When I am sitting at home with the windows open and I hear a siren, I might sometimes think, "hmm, I wonder what happened?" but then go back to whatever I was doing. I may tune out the sound and think not much of it. I might not even register a siren sound at all if I am absorbed in something at home.

Tonight, starting around 7pm or so, I heard what really seemed like siren after siren after siren. I imagine that many of my neighbors and people in various neighborhoods all around town must have heard the sirens. (did you? or am I losing my mind?) I felt that it was alarming enough to me that at 9pm, after what seemed to me like 2 hours of intermittent yet nonstop sirens, I called the Desk Sergeant / non-emergency number at the police station to ask if there was anything in particular going on. The response there was that it's nothing more than a very busy night. I subscribe to the Middletown alerts on Nixle, so I would like to think that if there was something major happening I may have been informed that way. I figured a quick phone call couldn't hurt though.

The last few days have been the first extremely hot days in a while, and its only a gut instinct but I feel like I hear more sirens generally when the weather gets into the unbearable range of hotness. Now, at 9:30 pm its still very hot (75 degrees if you believe Weather Underground which updates every minute, or 87 degrees if you believe the National Weather Service USWX, last updated just before 9pm). In any case the sirens seemed to have died down and I am very glad to hear (or not hear) that.

Photo courtesy of the Middletown Police Department website