New York, NY —

Steam whistles are no longer a mainstay of factories, trains and tugboats, but you can still hear them once a year, around midnight on New Years Eve, if you’re within earshot of the Pratt Institute, in the heart of Brooklyn.

REPORTER: It’s a little more than 12 hours before midnight, and Conrad Milster, the chief engineer of Pratt’s power plant, is putting the steam whistles through the paces--just as he’s done for most of the past 50 years.

MILSTER: The whistle is simply a tube, like an organ pipe, and when you pull the valve and open the valve, the steam comes out of the slot and it impinges on the edge of the tube, and causes the column of steam inside the tube to vibrate, and that’s what gives you the sound of the whistle.

REPORTER: One of the whistles is leaking a little, but Milster isn’t worried. He and his assistant, George Larino, specialize in wrenching the problems out of old pipes, valves and vents.

LARINO: There’s a disk there, and she has to seat properly. It has to be tight. So, right now, she’s lifted up for some reason. Could be junk in there. Could be a burr. Could be anything. So, we’ll just have to take it apart--the valve--and see what it is.

REPORTER: Hundreds of people come out to Pratt each year to literally blow off steam. Milster hands them a 20-foot-long rope, so they can tug it without standing too close to the whistle.

MILSTER: But quite honestly, they seem to wanna get up close and blow their eardrums out. It's like a boom box in a nightclub. We give them the cord, they want to blow their ears, fine, it's up to them.

REPORTER: Milster estimates the whistles can be heard for 2-3 miles on a clear night. He says you can gauge how good the economy is by the abandoned champagne bottles--and whether they’re mostly domestic or imported.

The steam whistles are only out one night a year, but the public is welcome to visit Pratt’s 120-year-old steam plant much of the time, when the campus is open. The turbines are no longer up-and-running and providing Pratt with power, but if you find Conrad Milster and ask nicely, he might fire them up and tell you all about them.