The moments before the beginning of the Twilight Age

[kato13]

Originally Posted by Marc

Probably, in a Twilight:2000 background and about talking about this thread, the return of these drills would be mean a tremendous knock to the morale of a citizenry that considered them a thing from the past.

I had them as a child in Illinois and they still are required. They are more generic Tornado/Disaster drills, but they end up very similar to nuclear attack preparedness. We would move to the center hallways, kneel down facing the lockers, cover our heads with our hands our and extra clothing. I'm a little to young for duck and cover.

[natehale1971]

Originally Posted by kato13

I had them as a child in Illinois and they still are required. They are more generic Tornado/Disaster drills, but they end up very similar to nuclear attack preparedness. We would move to the center hallways, kneel down facing the lockers, cover our heads with our hands our and extra clothing. I'm a little to young for duck and cover.

I went to Greenhill Elementary School in Rutherford County, and we did Tornado Drills, Fire Drills and Nuclear attack drills. We had those going from kindergarden all the way to fifth grade.

When i left Greenhill half-way through the fifth grade and went to Waxhaw Elementary, and then Parkwood Middle School (now Junior High) for the sixth grade we only did Fire Drills and maybe tornado drills.

When i went back to New Hope Middle School for seventh and eigth grades in Rutherford County again, we where still doing Tornado, fire and nuke attack drills. When i went to RS Central High School, we only did fire drills and tornado drills on a regular basis... we only did ONE or TWO nuke attack drills after ninth grade... Of course that was the tail end of the 1980s and we weren't expecting a sudden nuke attack at that point.

When i joined the navy in 1989, they where still training us to fight the Soviets. But instead we ended up figthing the Iraqis and other irregular forces in the failed Solami republic

[Targan]

Here in Perth the only drills I ever did at school were fire drills. Australia is not a very paranoid country and we tend to be very laid back as a society. We take the threat of fires pretty seriously but that is about it. Perhaps we should be a bit more on guard in this changing world we live in. Terrorists have said many times in the media that they consider Australia to be a target.

There are parts of Australia (the northern half) where cyclones are a yearly occurrence so I guess schools in those parts have the equivalent of tornado drills. We get a lot more early warning for cyclones than people in the US would get for tornadoes though.

[headquarters]

Originally Posted by Targan

Here in Perth the only drills I ever did at school were fire drills. Australia is not a very paranoid country and we tend to be very laid back as a society. We take the threat of fires pretty seriously but that is about it. Perhaps we should be a bit more on guard in this changing world we live in. Terrorists have said many times in the media that they consider Australia to be a target.

There are parts of Australia (the northern half) where cyclones are a yearly occurrence so I guess schools in those parts have the equivalent of tornado drills. We get a lot more early warning for cyclones than people in the US would get for tornadoes though.

I guess many forms of emergency preparedness could translate into useable methods for different types of crisis.

Up here I fel like there is no shred of preparedness at all for the most part .Even trying to allocate funds for such measures usually meets negativety and indifference in our politics .

Guess we will never get hit in the minds of our benevolent rulers ..

[TiggerCCW UK]

Here in NI, even with regular terrorist attacks going on all we ever did in school were fire drills. On the other hand given that the majority of bombings over here were carried out with a warning, a fire drill worked much the same as an evacuation for a bomb scare, to the point where there were a few times when we were evac'd from school thinking it was a drill and there had actually been a bomb alert phoned in. I think that at that time it would have been the same for the majority of the UK - certainly when I was at university I ended up writing a bomb alert plan for the uni after a false alarm which ended with the fire warden wandering over and opening the suspect bag "just to make sure"!!!

[Rainbow Six]

My school experience was the same as Tigger's. The occasional fire drill and that was it. Admitedly I went to school in Scotland, so our English posters may have had different experiences. In Scotland we always considered ourselves reasonably "immune" from terrorism; the popular perception was that any terrorist attacks on the UK mainland by the IRA etc would be focused solely on England. As it turned out that was the case, and I actually think that a lot of people carried on in that mindset after the threat to the mainland switched to Islamic terrorism; a lot of people only really woke up to the situation after the failed attack on Glasgow airport.

I've also experienced the false alarm scenario where someone who ought to know better decided the best way to deal with a suspect package was simply to open it to see what was inside it...

Oddly enough one of my work tasks at the minute is to update our contingency plans; a task that is admittedly long overdue and has been prompted by swine flu.

[Targan]

Originally Posted by Rainbow Six

Oddly enough one of my work tasks at the minute is to update our contingency plans; a task that is admittedly long overdue and has been prompted by swine flu.

Per capita Australia is being affected more by swine flu than anywhere else. Apparently it has to do with Australians being such enthusiastic international travellers.

[Trooper]

Originally Posted by natehale1971

I went to Greenhill Elementary School in Rutherford County, and we did Tornado Drills, Fire Drills and Nuclear attack drills. We had those going from kindergarden all the way to fifth grade.

Nuclear attack drills!

Our apartment building have bunker that can withstand nuclear weapons overpressure, firestorm or chemical attack.(escape tunnels, NBC protection, thick air tight steel doors etc..) In fact in urban areas you have to build air raid shelter to every apartment building . Local volunteer fire department even has civil defence unit and all volunteer fire units are trained for civil defence service.

Only drill in our school was fire drill. Civil defence was not PC in 80`s and nowdays you are labeled lunatic if you even speak about it .

[natehale1971]

Originally Posted by Trooper

Nuclear attack drills!

Our apartment building have bunker that can withstand nuclear weapons overpressure, firestorm or chemical attack.(escape tunnels, NBC protection, thick air tight steel doors etc..) In fact in urban areas you have to build air raid shelter to every apartment building . Local volunteer fire department even has civil defence unit and all volunteer fire units are trained for civil defence service.

Only drill in our school was fire drill. Civil defence was not PC in 80`s and nowdays you are labeled lunatic if you even speak about it .

Too true. People love to attack other people who believe in being prepared for the worst while hoping for the best.

[stoner63]

Its very interesting to hear all of your different personal experiences with the various forms of "attack" and emergency drills you had in school, especially the ones from Europe and Australia.
I grew up in NY. In elementary school we had nondescript "bomb" drills where we were escorted into the halls in 2 orderly lines. We then were told to kneel in front of the wall with our heads touching the floor where it met the wall and cover our heads with our folded arms, hands locked behind our necks.
No explanation or other instructions were given...ever.
Fire drills were also a parade ground maneuver to the recess area where we were organized to face the school.
Insanity !!!
Were we supposed to watch while it burned ?! Who was going to evac us ?!
They never discussed it.
In high school there were several bomb threats and they were treated like fire drills. Again, we still oriented to face the school and not 20 yards away.
Had these people not heard of shrapnel ?
I graduated in 1985 that is before the school shootings began occurring in the US.
I should hope now that the students are far more self aware and motivated towards survival and take their own preservation seriously enough to use their heads and do what makes sense should something occur while they were at school.

[Targan]

I recently read an excellent book titled The Unthinkable and it was all about which sorts of people tend to survive disasters and why. One of the strongest messages I took away from reading the book was that training really works - many if not most people suffer various psychological, physical and psychogenic effects when faced with extreme danger and stress and if you have trained for a contingency that allows you to act instead of just standing there or doing something stupid.

[simonmark6]

My Dad and Grandad were part timers in the Fire Service and took part in lots of Civil Defence Drills in the 50s, 60s and 70s. These were quite a big deal because the fire station they worked in was the first response unit to the BP Llandarcy Oil Refinery, one of the biggest in Europe at the time, BP Baglan Bay, a major chemical works and were the next station down the line for British Steel Company, Port Talbot, the biggest steel works in Europe, it still is, but not for much longer.

I asked my Dad recently what the Civil Defence plans were for my town. He laughed, if we were hit by conventional strikes, Briton Ferry was a big smoking holw and the emergency responses focused on there being a five to ten mile death zone centering on us. If it was a nuclear attack, the hole would be a bit larger, still smoking but radioactive to boot.

I asked him why the hell had we stayed in a place that was likely to be less survivable than ground zero, Hiroshima. He said, "No one would ever be stupid enough to to start a nuclear war, and if they were, the only people worse off than those who died before they knew the war started would be the survivors."

I guess he may have had a point. My personal future after having survived a nuclear war would have been: die slowly unless someone killed me for food, I could feed quite a few people even after a few months of starvation...