Stephen Colbert's Take On City's Fire Alert System

Stephen Colbert took some jabs at Detroit’s make-do fire-alert system on ”The Colbert Report.” (Comedy Central photo)

___________________________

Comedy Central comedian Stephen Colbert poked some fun at Detroit’s fire-alert system that’s not too far removed from the early can-and-string telephone prototype the other night, featuring the enterprising Detroit Fire Department on his “Hometown Heroes” segment.

Mired in the largest municipal bankruptcy in history with between $18 billion and $20 billion in debt, Detroit hasn’t upgraded its emergency-alert technology in the city’s 38 fire stations. Instead, firefighters have improvised, using Detroit-branded Faygo pop cans filled with screws to alert them of emergency calls.

It works like this:

An emergency alert comes into the firehouses by last-century facsimile technology; the sheet of paper shoots out of the paper feed, knocking over a Faygo can filled with screws or hitting a hinge that pulls on a wire and activates door bell– in kind of the way that the hip bone is connected to the leg bone, which is connected to the foot.

Colbert offers his well-timed comedic jabs with lines like Detroit turned its “lack of lemons into a lack of lemonade” and “these brave men and women deserve more chances to make do with less.”