ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXT I can't hear you: Nurse Gene Maley watches and tries not to listen as a siren at Mercy Hospital is tested.
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So what do you do when the emergency siren goes off?
“Duck under the desk,” replies Gil Sandler, the bard of Baltimore fads and foibles.
Wrong.
“Duck and cover” was the response in 1961. This is a new century.
“People have forgotten,” laments Richard McKoy, the city’s emergency management official who triggered the alarm Wednesday when thick black smoke began pouring from the Howard Street railroad tunnel.
“Obviously younger folks don’t remember what that siren’s purpose was. What we have to do is re-educate our public as to what to expect when they hear that sound – other than on Monday.”
The 112 sirens in Baltimore have been tested every Monday at 1 p.m. since about a dozen years after they were first put up in 1952 as part of the Civil Defense system.
Then it was the bomb; now it’s toxic chemicals.
During the Cold War there were two warnings, Sandler once explained in his “Baltimore Glimpses” column. The three to five minute alert signal meant “Enemy attack on Baltimore probable. Turn on your radio for emergency instructions.”
The three-minute take-cover blast was more foreboding: “Enemy attack on Baltimore is imminent. Take cover.”
A whole generation of Baltimore schoolchildren remembers curling up under their desks without really knowing why.
Of course, the enemy never attacked Baltimore.
And the first thing Baltimoreans did yesterday when the sirens went off for real for the first time ever was to call City Hall.
“We got a number of calls from people not understanding what was going on, but recognizing that something was happening,” says McKoy, the city’s emergency management director. “So our City Hall telephone lines were inundated for a while there. So that created somewhat of a problem for us.”
McKoy figures he’ll have to educate the public to alleviate that problem when the city revamps its emergency warning system.
“I may have to do it sooner,” McKoy quips.
When McKoy activates the siren, he says, you’re still supposed to turn on the radio and television. But McKoy doesn’t make that decision alone.
He consults The First Responder – that’s the first police, fire or public works official on the scene. The sirens are actually turned on by a fire department employee based at the city’s communications center in police headquarters.
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“Just as we’re activating it, we’re sending in a crawler to all the TV stations,” he says. That’s the little news strip that sometimes appears at the bottom of your screen.
Hector Torres, the fire department’s public information officer, telephoned all the TV stations.
“That won’t always occur, but we did that this time because it just wasn’t done before,” McKoy says.
The Emergency Alert System, which sounds a moderately irritating tone on the radio, also was triggered yesterday. The underground railroad fire Wednesday prompted the first use of the citywide system ever in an emergency.
“In the Schaefer days we did it once,” McKoy says, “but it was not because of an emergency.”
Local “clusters” have been sounded in the South Baltimore petrochemical corridor and along the Jones Falls flood plain. The all-clear signal is also a siren.
“The whole idea of the siren is to get their attention,” McKoy explains. “And it got their attention [Wednesday].”
But the whole process only takes a minute and a half.
The new system will not require the Monday lunch hour live tests that have become familiar for nearly a half-century now.
“We can test it by radio transmission,” McKoy says. “We do get a lot of complaints about the sound on Monday. Absolutely.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers made the original surveys that pinpointed the position of the 112 sirens, many found on rooftops. The corps is out of that business now.
“It was about the era of the bomb,” says McKoy, who’s 58. “We were concerned about the potential of having a bomb reach the United States. That was going to be the alerting system. That was the old Civil Defense concept.
“The federal government at that time came into every jurisdiction in the country and brought in sheltering equipment, water and food and bandages and things of that nature. Stocked all jurisdictions with those products and placed a siren alerting system in the jurisdiction.”
You’ll still see shelter signs on some buildings downtown. But there are no shelters left.
“No, they’ve all been de-escalated,” McKoy says. “All those products have been trashed. The water has rusted out completely. When we de-escalated, some of the food was then utilized and some of the bandages and those kinds of things were utilized. But most of that stuff was trashed.”
And air raid wardens turn up these days only in obituaries.