What´s the longest an alarm (car, business, or residential) has gone off without someone intervening?

March 3, 2008 7:50 AM

I´m curious what´s the longest an alarm (car, business, or residential) has gone off without someone intervening? I´m looking for either anecdotal or documented stories.

Sometimes when I hear the car alarms going off, I think, ¨What happens if they are out of town?¨

This must happen with house alarms when people are out of town on vacation...

posted by wogbat to Grab Bag (19 answers total)

Yep. Last time it happened to my friend's neighbours, the alarm sounded for well over six hours before someone got into the house to shut it off. And my friend was living in a row house at the time.
posted by LN at 7:59 AM on March 3, 2008

Car alarm on our street went off for 6+ hours while the owner was tubing down a river. It would stop every 5 minutes or so but always restarted. People were leaving notes on the car but we just fled the neighborhood for a movie to get away from it.

I used to have a car alarm but it would stop after a short amount of time, 5 minutes or so. Cycled through various sounds and then stopped.
posted by GaelFC at 8:02 AM on March 3, 2008

What often also happens is that some of the local birdlife learns this sexy new "call", and once that happens, it never stops (unless someone were to intervene with a shotgun) :-)
posted by -harlequin- at 8:07 AM on March 3, 2008

Ugh -- I remember when I was in high school, during the holidays one of our neighbors' house alarms went off. It went off for 3 fucking days.
posted by tastybrains at 8:19 AM on March 3, 2008

Just last week there was a loud high pitched beeping coming from somewhere a block or so away. I think it was some alarm system of some kind. It lasted for 4 or 5 days. I was never able to isolate the source (since it bounced around between buildings and stuff). During the day it was just at the edge of hearing, but when things quieted down at night it was very irritating.

It has stopped, thankfully. If it hadn't I would have asked askme how to make it stop.
posted by aubilenon at 8:26 AM on March 3, 2008

A friend of mine was a towie and got called to tow a car in which the alarm had been going off for 7.5 hours. The whole street came out to cheer as he pulled up and loaded it on.
posted by goo at 8:33 AM on March 3, 2008

I don't know if this counts but once my roommate went out of town and locked her room for a week without turning off her alarm. I had to unscrew the door hinges after the second day beccause I thought I was going to go insane.
posted by thebrokenmuse at 8:55 AM on March 3, 2008

I've been on the causing end of this before. When I lived in Atlanta and some tornadoes came through town, we lost power for a few days. We also learned that without power, our house alarm goes off with this high pitched nonstop noise. Of course, the alarm company went out of business and the password to shut off the alarm was a different, unknown password than the one to arm it. Took three days for the bloody thing to turn off. It wasn't too bad, though, as we were all living in hotels or at friends places for a few days.
posted by jmd82 at 9:17 AM on March 3, 2008

Nine hours, in a locked garage near my parents' house, in 1994. It went off around 6am, presumably once the battery died in the car. The garage door was literally covered in abusive messages for the owner, including one from me.
posted by dowcrag at 9:20 AM on March 3, 2008

All f***ing night long, on multiple occasions, right across the street, at the shop of a locksmith who installs alarms. Agggghhhh.
posted by caddis at 9:30 AM on March 3, 2008

When I lived in Newark, NJ, the first month after I moved into our fraternity house, a car horn went off from 3-7AM up in the projects one night. Turned out to be a guy, shot dead, slumped over his steering wheel.
posted by Mach5 at 9:55 AM on March 3, 2008 [2 favorites]

Down the block from me, a couple that had just renovated their house had an alarm go off. The alarm was hidden somewhere in a wall, and there was no obvious way to disable it. It was going off for something like 12 hours. On a Sunday, when it would be almost impossible to get a tradesman to come over.

When I was growing up, on a crowded street in Chicago, a car alarm went off in the wee hours, and kept going off for about 2 hours. When the (completely unaware) owner went out to his car in the morning it was pretty destroyed.
posted by adamrice at 10:06 AM on March 3, 2008

I didn't time it, but it must have been two or three hours of constant alarm (this was in the 80s before they would got quiet after a certain amount of time). The car was parked across from our apartment and would go off frequently. For whatever reason, the guy never came down this particular time. The cops were called, a tow truck was called, it was being hoisted up when the guy finally showed up, spitting and sputtering about his car being towed. The police officer (a very petite woman) visibly put her hand on her holster, and pointed her other hand back to the guy's apartment. He just sulked and slunk back inside, to the applause of all the neighbors (who were now out on their porches watching the scene).

That was the last time his alarm went off.
posted by Doohickie at 10:14 AM on March 3, 2008

Laurie Anderson in "United States Live" relates a story of a nearly deaf couple whose car alarm malfunctions while on a cross-country car trip.
posted by SansPoint at 11:29 AM on March 3, 2008

When I worked for (big alarm company), there was a news report about a house whose alarm system went off for 48+ hours during a very long very hot summer weekend. It was, thankfully, not one of ours but we got 50+ calls from people in the neighborhood demanding that we take care of the problem.

One of the news crews set up their remote shot down the block - in front of a house that just happened to have our sign in the front lawn. Oh, that was not a good weekend for the dispatch center.
posted by jaimystery at 11:52 AM on March 3, 2008

Here's a story.
posted by bink at 1:20 PM on March 3, 2008

Crap. I'm an idiot. Here.
posted by bink at 1:21 PM on March 3, 2008

A couple of months ago, on a fairly "residential" block in downtown Flushing, NY. Despite the area, some blocks can be surprisingly quiet. Not so on this glorious Sunday.

A Ford Taurus.

12+ hours, with only a few seconds of intermission between each go.

Finally call 311 (God smiled when this was made available to NYers), and within an hour of calling (at around 9:30 at night), the alarm stops.

I hate cars.
posted by chan.caro at 2:31 PM on March 3, 2008

Crap. I'm an idiot. Here.

You beat me to that link. :)
posted by Savannah at 10:43 PM on March 3, 2008