I missed this little gem last week!

Thursday morning, while sitting in class on campus, a siren went off. It seemed louder than a fire siren, and for a few moments, we were debating whether or not it was a fire drill. Really, we were hoping for an excuse to escape this particular class, where the graduate student teaching the class basically reads her Power Point slides for an eternal 90 minutes.

While scanning through the online Gazette-Times archives to see what I've missed the past few days, I discovered this article about the mystery siren. Apparently, it's a Cold War-era civil defense siren intended to warn us all of a potential nuclear attack. The siren sat forgotten atop Covell Hall for decades, until some prankster found out how to set it off. It also went off on New Year's Eve, but I either live too far from campus to have heard it or assumed it was a fire somewhere. Covell Hall also has a genuine bomb shelter in the basement. One of my classes is in Covell Hall. Now I have to find the bomb shelter tomorrow after class.

I lived in the Midwest for a while in a town that tested their tornado siren every month. I thought it was the coolest thing. My coworkers would cackle at me whenever I ran outside to listen. (Who can blame them? What a dorky thing to do!) The best part was that they also had a protocol for incoming nuclear attack, and would test that portion quarterly. This would've been 1996 or so, and they were still proving to the townspeople that they were ready to warn them of Soviet attack. Way to go, rural paranoid America!

Now that our own air raid siren has been discovered, it is being shipped to Astoria to be used as a tsunami warning device. What a shame. I was all ready to run outside the next time it went off in the middle of class.