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Moan On: Why Fog Horns Still Exist in the Age of GPS

Today's navigation technologies have all but washed away the need for coastal warning horns, and yet the fog horn's bellow endures.
The fog horn at Nash Point, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. Image: Simon Rowe/Flickr

BEEEEEEE-uuggnnnhhh.

A lighthouse fog horn emits a low, booming yawn over the water, giving vessels of all shapes and sizes safe passage through low visibility. You don't have to have grown up on the coast to know the sound. It's near universally recognizable. There was a time, not too long ago, when you could hear it droning along the coastlines of the world. Only now, it's getting harder and harder to hear.

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Some say the fog horn is dying. Modern maritime navigation technologies have all but washed away the need for coastal warning horns. Nowadays, captains have things like sonar, GPS, and seabed-mapping programs, to say nothing of lighthouses that use laser beams as echolocating warning systems, which help prevent running aground when it's otherwise impossible to see through fog with a naked eye.

And yet the fog horn's bellow endures. Despite the creep of advanced seafaring gadgets, there remains a place for a technology as seemingly antiquated as the fog horn, and even a place for real, live humans tasked with operating the humble warning signals.

Of course, many of the fog horns that can still be heard today have been brought into the 21st century, "replaced by simpler, electronic, automatic systems," according to Sonic Wonders, a global sound tourism guide with an entire page devoted to fog horns. (For the purpose of this article I'll focus on fog horns dotting the American West Coast, although the UK boasts its fair share of classic fog horns still in operation, like at Lizard Light House in Cornwall.)

Sonically, these Fog Horns 2.0 are far less jarring than the bowel-churning diaphones—noisemaking devices similar to organ stops—of yesteryear, and as Sonic Wonders notes, need considerably less upkeep.

Consider one of the new horns at East Brother, near Point Richmond, California. It's about the size of a fire hydrant, as KQED reports, and draws power from the sun and a 12-volt battery. Officials with the Coast Guard’s Aids to Navigation Team told KQED that "the biggest maintenance headache with the new horns is people stealing the batteries, thinking they can use them in their boats (they can’t)."

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You can hear the call-and-response of at least four fog horns blanketing the Bay Area in this recording from a foggy night in August 1987.

But then you've the Golden Gate fog horns, roughly 20 minutes due south by car from East Brother, which are operated manually. Late last year, The Bold Italic caught up with Jaime Briggs, who's among a modest crew of electricians who keep the iconic bridge's horns, beacon lights, and every other electronic component in between humming. Briggs and his crew are on call 24/7.

There are five fog horns under the span of the bridge, three horns beneath the Golden Gate Bridge roadway at mid-span, and another two horns atop the south tower pier, allowing ships to split the borders by sound alone. For most of the year, San Francisco's horns clock in about 2.5 hours of warning moans daily, according to GoldenGateBridge.org. They can cry out for days on end, if the gloom is thick enough.

Switching these horns on and off isn't rocket science. It's no more involved, really, than buzzing a friend into your apartment. Per The Bold Italic:

When it starts looking foggy, one of the crew members gets up, walks out to the sidewalk by the tollbooth, and looks under the Golden Gate Bridge. If they can’t see across the channel, they turn the horns on – not using, as you might imagine, a fantastic big red button under a plastic cover, but rather a mundane computer interface, à la Windows 95. The workers still have the old switch box mounted above a tool bench next to the “solvents and lube” box, I suppose out of nostalgia."

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For all the perks of automating everything, there is something to be said for such a brilliantly simple operating system, one that helped Greg Waugh, a fourth-generation San Franciscan who spent over a half-century operating tug boats and merchant ships through the Golden Gate, safely navigate the chilly waters.

“Navigating the fog is like driving your car down the highway with your hood up,” Waugh told KQED. By Waugh's estimation, the Bay area is blanketed by something like 1,500 hours of fog annually.

The fog horn at Point Reyes, San Francisco

It's easy to get swept away by the salty romance of the horn. And that's the thing: a good many of us have maybe never even heard one go off in real life, and yet we are familiar with the moan. It is the stuff of tall tales, cloudy pasts, and hotlines.

Seriously: If you're jonesing to listen to the Bay's fog horns in real-time, just dial (415) 202-3809, the unofficial San Francisco fog horn hotline, and have at it. Just make sure it's a foggy day. As of this writing, the hotline went straight to adult contemporary holding music.