Fairhaven fire boxes sold off

FAIRHAVEN, Mass.—Fire buffs swarmed the Fairhaven Fire Department to pounce on an unusual buying opportunity.

For $50 a piece, the department offered up its own fire alarm boxes.

“I was just looking at some cost effective ways for the town to pick up a little bit of money rather than just scrapping them or just throwing them away,“ said Chief Timothy Francis of the Fairhaven Fire Department.

The response to the fire box sale was overwhelming. All of the boxes, more than 100, were snatched up in about two days.

So what would one do with an old fire alarm box?

“I’ve seen them used as a doorbell. A lot of people will clean it up and put on a shelf as a piece of history,“ Francis said.

The chief said he has a lamp made from an older Fairhaven box in his office.

The alarm boxes have been used in Fairhaven since at least 1940.

“It’s been a system that’s been here through hurricanes and everything else. It’s worked well for the town in the years that they’ve had it for communication. But now with the new ages of cell phones and all the other ways there are to communicate, it’s getting kind of expensive to keep the wires on the pole and its getting costly to maintain that system,“ Francis said.

In recent years most of the alarms that came in were pranks, so Francis said it was time for the boxes to go.

There are still about 70 active fire boxes still on poles around town. Francis said they’ll be coming down in the next couple of months, but due to popular demand they’re already spoken for.