My air raid siren story

[mysid]

copperbadge's recent adventures with fire in a subway station and the numerous tales of people ignoring fire alarms in the comments remind me of an anecdote:

Once upon a time--in the 80's--I attended an all-girls Catholic high school. (No, really.) One day, I was in class when an air raid siren went off. We all looked around at each other with WTF? clearly written on our faces. This wasn't the fire alarm. The fire alarm we knew, and we knew what to do--go outside immediately. This was something completely outside the realm of our experience--except in old movies about WWII. How were we supposed to react to that? Go outside? Find the nearest bomb shelter? It was our parents' generation who'd been conditioned to "duck and cover", not us.

And why the hell did our school even have an air raid siren, many wondered. That one was easily answered by those of us with half a brain. The building was quite old, well over a hundred years old. (No sniggering, erastes. I know that's not old by European standards, but it's pretty good around here.) It was old enough that the siren had probably been installed during the Cold War and never removed.

The teachers were just as perplexed as the students. They knew that no one had intentionally set it off: (A) no news reports of Soviet ICBMs headed our way, and (B) even if they had been, no one remembered where the controls were to set the alarm off--or to turn it off. So chances were, the alarm had gone off because of a short or something. A short was quite possible as it was pouring down rain, and an old building is likely to have leaks.

And if this were just a false alarm, the teachers were reluctant to take us outside. (Did I mention that it was pouring down rain?) So, an executive decision was made by the principal to take us to the opposite end to the building where the alarms were not going off. It was a very long building. Our high school occupied one wing, the central portion was the convent and some college classrooms--our high school and a college shared one campus--and the wing at the other end was the chapel.

Now, stop and think about that for a moment. Air raid sirens are going off, which in old movies was usually a precursor to the skies raining down death and destruction, and they take a bunch of half-panicked teenagers into a chapel. Did that calm them? No. All around me I had people convinced that we were all about to die, and that they'd brought us here to pray before we died. White-haired Sr. Helen deciding to "reassure us" by standing up in front of us all, beginning to pray the rosary, and encouraging us to join in, had, of course, the opposite effect.

In the end, it was a short caused by a combination of old wiring and rain leaking in. The Fire Marshall scolded our principal for not taking us outside. He pointed out the the short could have caused a fire, in which case our staying in the building was a no-no.

(And I'm proud to report that I was not one of the idiots panicking.)

Update: gehayi has topped me once again. Go read about the time the factory she worked in caught fire.