[BC] Disaster preparedness

[Gary Peterson]

" When I was a kid those sirens were called air raid sirens. There was
a big one at the end of my street. They tested them once a week at
noon so people wouldn't start drinking the booze stored in their bomb
shelters. If they went off at any other time you knew something
serious was going on and it wasn't a celebration.
Rich "

We still have the sirens here.  A couple of decades ago, this area was
probably a primary target for Soviet nukes due to the concentration of
Minuteman missiles and B-52s.  The sirens remain and are used to warn of
tornadoes and flash floods.

A good friend lived in a small town a couple hundred miles from here during
the early 60s.  He likes to tell about the telephone company employee who
accidentally shorted a dedicated circuit and fired up the air raid sirens
during the height of the Cuban missile crisis.  I guess the F-sub-p (pucker
factor) was pretty high when that happened.

Gary, K?CX
Rapid City, SD