See subject. Even “lockdown” used for schools as opposed to prisons is brand new, it occurs to me.
A) anyone heard it before?
B) is it a Boston PD invention?
C) what the hell could they be thinking by using those words?
Is “shelter” a verb in normal usage in English?
The company I work for has held shelter in place drills for years now. There are several companies near that use a lot of dangerous compounds. The idea is to stay in the offices, close all doors and turn off air handling equipment. I am guessing BPD did not require that last one.
I have often seen shelter as a verb.
Yeah, I’ve been hearing it for a while now. Not in this context though (criminal/suspect on the loose) mostly for disasters.
“Shelter in Place Warning” has been an Emergency Alert System category since at least 2004.
It’s been around a while. I was going to say that I’ve heard shelter in place warnings on the news occasionally, and looking at Wikipedia’s list, it makes sense since there have been several in the San Francisco Bay Area. The earliest listed is from 1997, for the North Hollywood shootout.
In my office (federal agency in DC), it’s been an option in our emergency response training for some years now. It wasn’t necessarily designed for instances of escaped criminals, but rather for disasters like a dirty bomb, where evacuating people into the streets would just make the situation worse.
For decades. I work in an area that is something of a minor league industrial hell - fertilizer plant, sulfuric acid plant, refineries. “Shelter in place” is a pretty common parlance out here for what to do ( and where ) when there are certain types of atmospheric chemical releases or other disasters.
The National Weather Service uses it in tornado warnings
The school district I worked for in California did shelter in place drills regularly, as long ago as 2001.
I don’t recall hearing shelter in place before, but shelter as a verb, yes, loads of times.
As in, ‘he sheltered her with his body’ or ‘she was sheltering her infant’, for example.
All caps for Emerg. Alert Sys.: what are you referring to?
Easy enough to Google…
http://transition.fcc.gov/pshs/services/eas/
Every hear the alert on your TV, “this is a test of the Emergancy Alert System…”
In my area, it’s always referred to as the “Emergency Broadcast System.”
I thought that the name was updated. It’s been awhile since I’ve paid attention to be in any detail, so maybe not.
Yep, they definitely use it for tornadoes here. It means “stay home and get in the closet, stupid, don’t try to drive somewhere in a tornado”.
Right, meaning to protect another. Whereas here they mean to take shelter.
Not keen on it.
EAS officially replaced EBS nationwide (USA) in 1997.
Yes, there are some oil refineries around the S. F. Bay Area. Every time they have an incident that involves release of nasty fumes (like if there’s a fire or a leak), there is some kind of emergency broadcast. “Shelter In Place” is one of the categories of response that they might ask people to do, depending on the extent of the toxic release, how dangerous it is, wind conditions and direction, and so forth.
It means stay indoors and keep windows closed, and I think shut of air conditioning if it draws in air from outside. It is used for less serious cases, as opposed to serious cases that might result in an evacuation order.
ETA: And as most others have already noted: No, it’s nothing new.
In South Florida, we’re told to “shelter in place” during hurricanes, if our homes our strong enough.