What's with all the noise?
Many of you will have been awakened by our siren sounding a number of times between Saturday and this morning (Monday), and be wondering what's going on.
To give you some background, the siren has been out of commission for many months after the tower on which it was mounted was surveyed and found to be a risk. The replacement pole and siren has finally been installed and was up and running as of Friday evening.
When we receive a call at night, up to 7am, a radio signal is sent to the station at the same time a message is sent to our firefighters’ pagers via another network. At the station a timer starts and if the pager message is not received within 30 seconds the siren sounds as a back-up alert. These pager messages are expected to be received within 15 to 20 seconds.
At 4:20am on Saturday morning the pager message was delayed by just over 30 seconds and at 5:10am this morning the delay was closer to a minute.
To make matters worse, there was another delay for the call at 6:40am this morning and at the same time there was an issue with the systems running our Communications Centre in Wellington. The fixing of these issue inadvertently caused the activation of the sirens of a half dozen volunteer fire brigades around the lower North Island, including us and causing ours to sound twice for this call. Fortunately, we were able to silence it before two more potential activations occurred due to the faults.
Please bear with us while we work through the pager delays with our organisation, and we hope not to wake you too often from here on.
⚠️ DOGS DIE IN HOT CARS. If you love them, don't leave them. ⚠️
It's a message we share time and time again, and this year, we're calling on you to help us spread that message further.
Did you know that calls to SPCA about dogs left inside hot cars made up a whopping 11% of all welfare calls last summer? This is a completely preventable issue, and one which is causing hundreds of dogs (often loved pets) to suffer.
Here are some quick facts to share with the dog owners in your life:
👉 The temperature inside a car can heat to over 50°C in less than 15 minutes.
👉 Parking in the shade and cracking windows does little to help on a warm day. Dogs rely on panting to keep cool, which they can't do in a hot car.
👉 This puts dogs at a high risk of heatstroke - a serious condition for dogs, with a mortality rate between 39%-50%.
👉 It is an offence under the Animal Welfare Act to leave a dog in a hot vehicle if they are showing signs of heat stress. You can be fined, and prosecuted.
SPCA has created downloadable resources to help you spread the message even further. Posters, a flyer, and a social media tile can be downloaded from our website here: www.spca.nz...
We encourage you to use these - and ask your local businesses to display the posters if they can. Flyers can be kept in your car and handed out as needed.
This is a community problem, and one we cannot solve alone. Help us to prevent more tragedies this summer by sharing this post.
On behalf of the animals - thank you ❤️
Poll: Would you rather: Christmas in summer forever or winter forever?
Just a bit of a fun poll to get you thinking.
If you had to live out your Christmas days, would you prefer it was a summer Christmas or a winter Christmas?
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62% Summer
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36.5% Winter
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1.5% Other - I'll share below
Worst Xmas ever?
There's a a lot of planning that goes into Christmas day and sometimes things just don't go to plan. But it can be a good thing - a family mishap or hilarious memory that you can laugh about in Christmases to come.
Whether you burnt the dinner or were stranded at an airport...
Share your Christmas mishaps below!
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