Today I was walking back to the office with a friend after lunch. We had gone a bit early, and were about half way back when the noon test of the civil defense siren started up.
I was surprised that the sound freaked me out a bit. That slow winding up before it really starts going sent a chill through me. I haven’t been outside when it starts up, and so close, so it’s the first time I’ve had that happen.
I couldn’t figure out at first why it bothered me so much, but I realized it reminded me of all the Cold War movies about nuclear attack. Yeesh.
We had the same thing happen here, in Paris, TX, the other day. **babygirl **called me to find out if I knew what it was. I didn’t, but assumed it was a test of some sort. She turned on her scanner and found out that it was, indeed a test.
There should be some kind of warning before TPTB test these things. How many people look to the skies to see if it is clouded with MiG’s or “godless tornadoes”?
This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the Federal, State and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, the signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions. This station serves the <local municipality> area. This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System.*
I did that almost from memory.
I still remember when Reagan’s, “…I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes,” insanity was cut loose. This was while Chernenko was on death’s door (as he was practically from the time he became General Secretary) and the Soviets allegedly went apeshit and started upping alert levels even though the whole thing was clearly an incredibly tasteless joke on Reagan’s part. In response (being close to three different primary strategic target sites) the school started running nuclear response drills, as if huddling under cafeteria tables was going to save anyone within a 50 mile area. (This was only a few months after the shootdown of KAL007 and the Able Archer 83 exercise that the Soviets apparently though was a prelude to an actual attack.)
Every time one of those EBS tests came on, I was waiting for them to announce the end of the world. I still hate that thing; one piece of Cold War memorabilia that I’ll never own.
Back in the 1970’s I was working at a radio station on the overnight shift, which pretty much just involved sitting there and watching the automated equipment run and taking readings every hour. Perfectly fine since I was in college and used the time to study.
One of the things in the station was an AP wire teletype. This thing ran constantly, spitting out news reports on a long roll of yellow paper. It was noisy so we kept it in the transmitter room. The news guys would go in there and pull off the latest stories when they were setting up their newscasts. We ignored it most of the time, but sometimes stories came through that AP flagged as “IMPORTANT” or “URGENT”. The arrival of these stories was accompanied by the ringing of a bell; three times for Important and 5 times for Urgent. The bell had a repeater in the control room and when I heard it I was supposed to get up, go to the teletype, tear off the story and stick it on the news staff’s board so they would see it when they came in in the morning.
We could also get EBS tests on the teletype. These were accompanied by 10 rings and I was supposed to get those and log them as well.
So, one night I’m in the station and a long string of bells goes off. I wonder briefly why we are getting an EBS test in the middle of the night, then get up and wander into the transmitter room to see what is going on. Keep in mind that teletypes in those days were fairly slow, so the story was still printing when I arrived. I read:
I remember that I froze and to this day remember that my exact thought was “My God! It’s starting and I’M WATCHING IT HAPPEN!”
In actuality, the story was reporting the crash of the Cosmos 954 satellite, which was carrying a nuclear reactor and crashed into northern Canada. But until enough of the story came through for me to realize what was happening I was freaking out more than a little bit. It’s still one of the top “oh shit!” moments of my life.
I grew up in the cold war era, but the sirens don’t have that associate. Every weekday at noon, the firehouse would test its siren (it was a volunteer fire department), so you heard it all the time.
Something like that happened to me, but unrelated to Cold War movies, exactly:
I was in an airplane, and I saw cops with their blinkers on as we were exiting from a city at nighttime. It was vaguely disturbing to me to see bright flashes of lights popping up seemingly at random from one spot until it dawned on me that they reminded me of flak guns (which I’ve only seen from footage and movies.)
Many an Airman can quote verbatim the test message for the Lackland Air Force Base Big Voice System. These things are basically outdoor PA systems designed to alert all base personnel of emergency situations such as a natural disaster or an impending enemy attack. Each base uses two separate signals for these, so you know whether it’s a tornado or something more man-made like marauding ninjas.
During Field Training, if the Big Voice’s attack signal sounded, we were required to drop to a knee, don our gas masks, and then lay face down on the ground until given the All Clear, a maneuver we practiced often. Tell ya what, you’ve got some time to think to yourself when you are lying face down on the concrete in chemical warfare gear.
Each base tests the signal at a certain time on a certain day each week, and it’s always good to know when this test occurs so you don’t make a fool of yourself by being the only one to dive under a table soon after changing duty stations, or so I’ve been told.
That said, mostly they are used to play the various bugle calls throughout the day, mainly Reveille, Retreat, and Taps. When one of these calls sound, people outdoors stop what they are doing and come to parade rest or attention, saluting as appropriate, including people driving (it’s disorienting to see traffic just grind to a halt all at once everywhere).
If you want a creepy feeling, try having grown up in the 1950s, when that sound signaled an “atomic bomb drill” in our school, and we all had to get under our desks and cover our heads. Sheesh, for a tornado drill we at least went into the hall.
Of course there was the legendary false alarm in 1971. You’ll note it wasn’t actually cancelled for 26 minutes.
My god tanstaafl I’ll bet you feel every drop of sweat run down your neck!
My old mum and nan lived through the Blitz(Made me laugh they always used to sneer at their friends who evacuated to the countryside)and showed no signs of PTSS,they even quite calmly told me how during a raid they’d huddle in the cupboard under the stairs and listen to the bombs going off they said, like a giants footsteps coming towards them.
They knew that they were safe(from that stick of bombs at least)when the next "footstep"was heard on the other side of the house and then they’d speculate which of their neighbours were unfortunate.
Like I say they seemed completely unaffected by their experiences,no jumping at loud bangs or anything like that,when one day the Civil Defence siren was sounded as a test .
And very quietly(I dont think I was supposed to hear it)my mum said I HATE that sound.
Not a very exciting story I know but at the time it made a deep impression on me,though a kid I was diplomatic enough to pretend I hadn’t heard.
This experience wasn’t so much scarring as it creeped me out a bit one summer afternoon in 1976.
A few days before, I had seen the 1960 version of The Time Machine. At one point in the movie as the protagonist (Rod Taylor) is traveling forward into the future, he stops in 1960’s London just as WWIII is beginning. As you see people dashing into bomb shelters with the futile hope they’ll protect them from the in-coming nuclear blasts, you hear the distinctive civil defense siren (i.e., the overlapping one that gradually revs into full force and then suddenly drops off and seems to echo as the next siren wave revs up). Later in the movie, after Taylor’s character has traveled hundreds of thousands of years into the future, we hear the same siren again only this time it’s used to hypnotize the Eloi to walk into a black sphinx-like building where they’re dragged underground to be devoured by the Morlocks.
I wasn’t thinking about any of this a few days later when I was visiting a small zoo in the Sacramento-area. At least I wasn’t until noon when the local fire department ran its weekly civil defense siren test. Granted, it wasn’t a traumatic experience hearing that overlapping/echoing noise again but I would be lying if I told you that I didn’t feel at least a little disturbed and uncomfortable for a few minutes.
I associate those sirens not with atomic bombs, but with nuclear accidents.
I grew up - and three years ago moved back to - within a couple miles of Three Mile Island. After the accident, they installed a bunch of those sirens and they still test them all the time.
