What do the different sirens heard from Emergency Vehicles mean? Such as Wail, Yelp, Priority, etc?
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I sometimes use sirens for my job. I use the wail tones while driving along a straight or long road, and yelp tones at intersections.
I remember being told that the reason we do this is not only to grab people’s attention, but also because the yelp tone sends the siren in different directions. So, for example, the wail tone will go in a big long wave out the front, and the yelp will go a smaller way out the front, and also out the sides. This helps at an intersection, because there is traffic coming from 4 directions.
There is another siren that my country uses called “hi-Lo” tone, which is literally a high tone, followed by a low tone then repeated. Like what people think of as “European sirens”. I like to use this one when driving on a highway.
Outside of this, the siren is literally just to warn people that 1. You are coming and 2. People need to get out of the way. Apart from the yelp siren use at intersections, I don’t believe there are any particular uses or each type of siren (in terms of what you are responding to) and it just comes down to operator preference.
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