Sarah Trafton is reporting for Columbia-Greene Media the distinctive wail of the Catskill village fire alarm is a thing of the past, since the Catskill Fire Company started using new high-band pagers on November 7. The upgrade is part of a multi-million-dollar countywide project to increase coverage for firefighters. “Our pagers would trip 50 percent of the time on low-band,” Assistant Fire Chief Patrick McCulloch said. “High-band uses all the towers. Now they will trip no matter where we are.” McCulloch said the new system is 100 times better than the old. There are no dead spots, he said. “It will be more reliable and require less manpower than the old system,” said William Lawrence, chairman of the Greene County Legislature Public Safety Committee. All members of the Catskill unit have been outfitted with the new pagers and the high-band radios have been ordered. The historic old siren will not be retired completely, however. It will be switched on manually at low-band frequency the first Tuesday of each month between 6 and 7 p.m., when the firefighters meet, McCulloch said. Read the full story at HudsonValley360 [dot] com.